


Twenty-Four Frames A Second

by VoidVesper



Category: Fortnite Squad - SNL Sketch, Saturday Night Live, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Adam Driver - Freeform, Ambivalent Consent, Blow Jobs, Body Piercing, Childhood Trauma, College, College Student Rey (Star Wars), Cum Fetish, Cum Play, Daddy Dom William McTavish, Daddy Kink, Daddy's little girl, Dildos, Dom/sub, Dubious Consent, Dubiously Consensual Blow Jobs, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Face Slapping, Falling In Love, Film Geek, Film History, Film Noir, Film nerds need love too, Films, First Time Blow Jobs, Foodie, Forced Orgasm, Foster Care, Glasses, Hair Washing, Hollywood, Kylo Ren wears Glasses, Los Angeles, Loss of Virginity, Makeover, Management Reserves The Right To Change The Tags As The Story Progresses, Master/Slave, Masturbation, Mildly Dubious Consent, Obsession, Old Movies, Older Man/Younger Woman, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Orgasm Denial, Pampering, Past Sexual Abuse, Piss Play, Piss kink, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Protective Kylo Ren, Punishment, Sapiosexual, Secret Relationship, Sexual Inexperience, Shh Princess Daddy's got you, Slow Build, Slut training, Soulmates, Tags Contain Spoilers, Teacher-Student Relationship, Urination, Urolagnia, Vaginal Fingering, Virgin Rey (Star Wars), Watersports, Wetting, body fluids, cinephilia, classic Hollywood, daddy dom, dd/lg, film studies - Freeform, kinky romance, movie theater, nerds are sexy, piss drinking, reylo au, sapiophilia, sexual awakening, silent film
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:06:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 53,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23388475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoidVesper/pseuds/VoidVesper
Summary: Rey loves the movies. William McTavish does, too. When she takes his film history class at college, sparks fly like a nitrate fire. Cinephilia meets daddy kink meets nerd porn.*** OK, let's be honest: even though William McTavish is the stated main character, at its heart, this is really a BDSM Daddy Kylo fic.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, William McTavish/Rey (Star Wars)
Comments: 158
Kudos: 328





	1. The Silent Era

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Poaxath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poaxath/gifts).



> _Film is truth twenty-four times a second. ---- Jean-Luc Godard_
> 
> Thank you to Poaxath for generously letting me riff on the excellent fic "Yes, Daddy".

_Today I’ll look him in the eye_ , thought Rey.

The three pages of notes for her first assignment rattled in her sweaty hands as she pounded across her campus’s pavement in time with her overtaxed heart. A crush was its own kind of workout, and Rey’s pulse couldn’t keep pace with the minty, excited, terrified glow spreading across her chest at the thought of seeing him again.

_Him._ Professor McTavish.

She’d chosen the Introduction to Film Critique course out of genuine interest. It met twice a week in the campus’s vast and ornate Starkiller Auditorium – one session for lecture and discussion, the other for viewing the required feature-length films on the theater’s huge silver screen. The gum-snapping juniors seated behind her on the first day bragged to each other how this was the easiest way to get a pesky English requirement over with – _dude, it’s, like, watching movies? For three credits_? But for Rey, getting to sit in the theater’s lush red velvet seats twice a week and watch movies was something she’d _relinquish_ credits to do.

There was something about movies that spoke to her in a private, intimate language. Other moviegoers only saw car chases and hot kisses while they dully munched their popcorn. Rey could tune out the noise. She couldn’t help but hone in on every decision the director made in telling a story. Every choice was a whisper in her ear about what it meant to be human. Sometimes, when the movie sang its private song to her, the sheer mastery of it would make her gasp in delight. A dark movie theater was the only safe space to cry, and sometimes, when she did, she could feel as if the movie itself was laying a comforting arm across her small, beaten shoulders.

Seeing a movie had always provoked Rey’s mind. But lately the ideas percolating up after the credits rolled were more than fleeting opinions. They were crystallizing into long chains of thought. Maybe being forced to turn in papers on time would give her the courage to write down the things she’d been rolling around in her head. She’d grown used to swallowing her opinions. It seemed less scary to voice them if there was a professor giving her permission, she reasoned.

But then she saw the professor.

“Call me William,” he told the class as he leaned his looming frame against the front of the auditorium stage. Warm crinkly eyes behind dark hipster glasses. Mussed salt and pepper hair, just long enough to feel good running through your hands. Twice her age, but just as vital. His shoulders seemed to fill the room.

Rey couldn’t breathe.

And she couldn’t follow his opening remarks, either. As he paced the front of the room and ticked off the class’s requirements in his booming voice _I know all of you have seen movies before – and that’s great – but we’re going to, uh, do things a little differently here_ Rey tried to catch her breath. _We’re going to talk about some of the things that make certain movies really exceptional – and give you some tools to understand why._ He was awkward, and powerful, and grotesquely handsome, and when he raised his thumbs and forefingers in L-shapes to frame an imaginary movie screen Rey gulped at how big his hands were. _We’re going to cover Old Hollywood – raise your hand if you’ve seen Citizen Kane? Ok? Not so many people? How about The Wizard of Oz? Ok, that’s better._ She couldn’t put her finger on the girlish tickly sensation she felt about him. It was the same delight a small child feels sitting on someone’s lap, thrilled by the attention a grown-up is paying to you and only you – but it was mixed with something else. Something darker, thicker, more hungry . . . more adult.

“But don’t think we’re not going to cover some world cinema, too,” said Professor McTavish. “I’ve got some great films picked out -- Ok? Yes, you in the back?” he said, pointing to a listless student’s raised hand.

“Yeah, are we, like, going to see, you know, something _good_?” the student yawned.

_How rude_ , thought Rey, glowering slightly.

If the question phased Professor McTavish, though, he didn’t show it. “Well, what would you consider good?” he answered.

“You know,” he fumbled. “Like a Star Wars movie or something.”

“Excellent point,” said Professor McTavish. Rey noticed how the topic put a spark of alertness in his already impressive posture. He vaulted up onto the stage with the vigor of a man half his age and started scrawling on the dry erase board stationed there. “ _Star Wars_ ,” he said aloud as he scribbled it on the dry erase board in big sprawling letters. The reach of his arm was immense. “Does anyone know where the term ‘Jedi’ comes from?”

_I know_ , thought Rey. She had read it once, in a biography about George Lucas. But she was too shy to raise her hand. The long muscle in her thigh started twitching with nervous energy and she pressed her notebook to it to stay calm.

“Jedi,” continued Professor McTavish as he wrote on the board, “comes from the term _jidaigeki,_ which in Japanese means ‘era drama’. Basically, a period drama set during the Edo period – that’s from roughly the 17th to 19th century. This isn’t a Japanese history class, so I don’t expect you to know that, ha ha.” His laugh was cringy _and_ delightful. Rey blushed a little, overwhelmed with the adorkableness of it all.

“And they’re often samurai dramas,” he continued, “with lots of swordfighting.” He drew an arrow from the term and kept writing. “One of the most famous _jidaigeki_ directors is Akira Kurosawa, director of movies such as _Rashomon, Yojimbo, Sanjuro_ – anyone heard of those? No? Ok. Maybe we’ll add one of those to the curriculum, too. In 1958,” he narrated while continuing to write, “Kurosawa directed a movie called _The Hidden Fortress_. That movie is about two sidekicks – one tall and one short – who find a treasure. That gets them mixed up in an adventure where a swordsman has to rescue a princess – a very headstrong princess, I might add. Does that sound familiar to anyone?”

Suddenly a wave of revelation washed over Rey. It was suddenly all so clear to her, as clear as that moment Helen Keller understood the word “WATER” finger-spelled into her wet palm. Every movie was connected to every other movie, in the same kind of tangled, sprawling, living web Professor McTavish had scrawled on the board. Every movie has parents. Grandparents. A lineage. _No movie is born alone. No one is inspired to make a movie unless they love movies. And the only way to love movies . . . is to know the ones that have come before._

Before she knew what she was doing, she raised her hand.

The sight of someone showing signs of life in his class sent a charmingly crooked grin across Professor McTavish’s face. To her horror and delight he met Rey’s eyes eagerly.

“Yes,” he said, motioning to her.

_Oh god_ , Rey thought. If she had any hope of remembering what she was going to say, it was gone now. She hadn’t even been conscious of raising her hand. She’d jerked it upward before the complete thought had formed in her mind, like how you yank your hand away from a hot pan before you feel the burn. And now she was looking into his eyes, those warm brown eyes that glowed with paternal charm, whose undivided attention felt like lapping up liquid gold.

The entire room was looking at her. Her face burned. She could just shake her head and say _never mind_ , cringe back into herself . . .

. . . disappoint him.

But something burned in her fiercely, something bigger than just hungering to please a teacher. Never in her life had she met someone who was just as passionate about movies. That bond was so great it didn’t matter if he was her professor, or twenty-some years older than her, or – married? She shot a quick look at his hand. No ring. The observation sent another giddy thrill through her. The excitement of finding one of her own kind overcame her trepidation, and even though her voice shook, she tried to speak as loudly as she could.

“Is _The Hidden Fortress_ the only movie that inspired _Star Wars_?” she asked. “Or are there others?”

Rey saw a look wash over Professor McTavish’s face. His gaze clocked onto her, for just one sharp, gossamer moment. And in that moment she felt him measuring her too, just as she had done to him a moment before. Weighing the ways in which they were different, the insurmountable ways that all common sense decreed should erect sensible, rational boundaries between them . . . and reveling instead in the miraculous, serendipitous way they were the same.

“Yes, there are,” he said, regaining himself. “So many. George Lucas saw many films in his years as a film student at USC. There’s the foreshortened title crawl – that’s borrowed from Buck Rogers serials of the 1930s. And _The Dam Busters_ – that’s an British war movie whose climax–” he seemed to choke a little on the word _climax_ – “is an RAF mission to blow up a dam with one precise hit. But more than that,” he continued, sweeping a section of the board clean with his eraser and scribbling as quickly as he could in time with his stimulated mind, “Lucas borrowed ideas from everywhere. The King Arthur legends. Chinese and Navajo philosophy, with the idea of a universal force surrounding and flowing through everything. The science fiction novels of E.E ‘Doc’ Smith and Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert. And of course, the writings of Joseph Campbell, about the hero’s journey and how it appears in every human culture, in every story across history.”

“So if _Star Wars_ is inspired from all these sources,” said Rey, heart pounding, “including every story written, by _every_ human, _ever_ . . . doesn’t that make it the _ultimate_ fan fiction?”

If the look he’d given her before indicated that she had impressed him, the fleeting expression Rey saw absolutely, unmistakably, right down to her marrow , made her believe for just one nanosecond that Professor McTavish . . .

. . . well, no, he couldn’t be feeling that.

Not about her.

Even if she was feeling it, too . . .

“That’s an excellent point, uh . . .” Professor McTavish stumbled. “I’m sorry, what is your name?”

“Rey,” she said, head downcast in sudden abashment.

“Rey,” he said, lingering on her name like someone tasting a delicacy for the first time. He cleared his throat and regained his composure. “Like I said, that’s an excellent point. In fact, I invite you to make that your thesis for our first assignment.” The class let out a collective groan as he wrote the assignment on the board. “I want you to write about a movie that resonated deeply with you – good or bad – and explain _why_.” He underlined the word _why_ twice. “I don’t just want to hear about whether you liked it or not. I want you to look deeply into _why_ you did or didn’t like it. Explain it to me like you’re a doctor diagnosing a patient. Is it healthy? Or is it sick? And if it’s sick, how can you tell? And what’s the cure?”

“How many pages?” someone yelled from the back.

“At least two. More if you like. Ok. Let’s dim the lights and get started. I’ve got some great silent films to start our overview of film history.”

Professor McTavish had carefully curated a gourmet buffet of silent film for them. She could feel the care he’d taken in selecting just the right examples – a nibble of Muybridge’s sequential photos of a horse in mid-gallop, a sprinkle of early motion toy zoetropes and thaumatropes and phenakistoscopes, the rich nitrate stock blacks and dreamlike motion of Edison’s Kinetoscopes. The theater’s immense screen flattered the moving images, giving them an enchanted, almost divine power.

“Modern viewers think silent films are herky-jerky and unnaturally sped up,” Professor McTavish’s voice resonated from the back of the room as the class grew hypnotized by the luxuriant, almost underwater swirls of Anna Belle’s serpentine dance. “Just think, Annabelle Whitford performed forty-two seconds of this dance in 1895. And we’re watching it now. Think of all the dances that were lost forever, in all of human history. And now here, in a tar paper shack in New Jersey, those dark ages ended. Nothing would ever be lost again.” The raw excitement of how Edison’s crew must have felt that possibility sent thrilled prickles up the back of Rey’s neck. She desperately craved to have Professor McTavish’s hands be what smoothed them back down again.

Rey desperately wanted to pay close attention to his next offerings. Even though she’d already seen _The Great Train Robbery_ (“This movie invented the idea of editing”, explained Professor McTavish) or _A Trip To The Moon_ (“Much of early special effects were inspired by stage magic.”), she was hungry to hear his special insights. But this idea about _Star Wars_ being the ultimate fan fiction kept rolling around in her mind. She tried to hush it by immediately scribbling down each thought as it occurred, in the hopes that the overactive idea would settle down enough to let her enjoy a Keystone Kops short and _Gertie The Dinosaur_.

But there was a third fixation competing for her attention. Right now she was safe inside the dark, in the reflected moonglow of the movie screen. But soon the lights would go up, and Professor McTavish would cease to be a booming, warm voice at the back of the room. He would be standing before her again, at the front of the room. The anticipatory pleasure of looking at him again sent a shivery, Christmas-morning feeling through her body. Not that Christmas had ever worked out so well for her. That’s the holiday of managing expectations, even when they get the best of you. Maybe when the lights went up she’d realize she’d oversold herself on him. Maybe she was only smitten for some strange, pheremonal reason, some hiccup in her menstrual cycle that was prodding her between the shoulder blades and purring _mmm, that one, that tall one, he’s a good DNA delivery system, you’ll want to get on that_.

But then the lights went up.

And she wasn’t wrong.

It wasn’t his height, or how the plane of his chest seemed perfect for resting one’s head upon, or the near-simian power in arms hidden under the most innocuous of plaid button-down sleeves. It wasn’t how the myriad asymmetries of his face made a pleasurable, unsolvable puzzle for the eyes.

Rey knew how a movie camera works. To our naked eyes, it looks like the film streams through the projector in one unbroken flow. But really, it’s a slide show in fast motion. The projector locks one frame at a time in the gate. Flashes its image on screen. Then closes its shutter. The film only advances to the next frame behind that dark closed shutter, like a modest lover slipping out of her clothes behind a folding screen. This striptease happens twenty-four times in one second. Your weak human eyes will never see it, but half the time you’re watching a movie, you’re looking at a dark screen.

Rey could see his dark screen. She saw it not in words or proof but in deep somatic prophecies, sensations of where he could and would touch her already inscribing promises onto her nerve endings. Pressure, pain, pleasure. And the deep wants he would dredge out of her in great brutal fistfuls from where she’d buried them, the Pompeii of her heartbreaks and fragile childish hopes and managed expectations. _Oh, daddy_. That Pandora’s box of a craving. Lock it tight.

She bolted upright and stumbled out of her row, knocking her knees on every flapping spring-loaded theater seat as she passed.

“Class . . . dismissed?” she heard his perplexed voice behind her, and the spattering of cruel giggles that tore at her back as she dashed out of the theater.

It was raining. She ran through the needle-prick shower through the quad, past the new buildings, past the deluxe, high-rise dorms, all the way to the forlorn edge of the campus where no one with money goes. A lone concrete barrack of a dorm sat there, dwarfed by sheltering oak trees. The dorm and the trees had the same early ‘70s birthday. One grew impressive and the other was dwarfed by time.

She turned her key in the main door’s lock – no keyswipe here, not for a building destined for euthanasia – and ran down the narrow cinderblock hallway to her dorm room. She was desperate: to write, to hide, to plunge her fingers below her waistband and agree with her body about what this afternoon had meant –

Her room was as meager as they come. Foster children get free state college before they age out of the system. The state pays, but the university pockets the difference. Rey didn’t care if her room was brutally utilitarian. Bed, desk, lamp, chair. It was shelter. She had the small luxury of a typewriter and a mini-fridge. She had the priceless luxury of living alone. Managed expectations.

She threw her bookbag down on the ground and threw herself into her desk chair. Without even taking off her jacket she _zznick-zznick_ wound a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter. Her heart was pounding and the coiling spiral of lust was churning around everything warm and vital below her navel. She pounded out a title

_Blue Harvest_

and cried out, and yanked down the zipper of her jeans and it was never her own hands on her. It was his hands _Call me William,_ his tongue against her earlobe, that voice resonating in the seashell folds of her ear, in the finger he’d plunged inside her _Better yet_ two fingers, stroking the wishbone yoke of her internal clit, her two sweet spots

_call me Daddy_

and when she came she said aloud _yes_ , to no one at all,

to the dark frame.


	2. The Transition To Sound

Rey didn’t need an alarm to wake up. It must have been four in the morning, the cold bleak hour only known to sleepwalkers and insomniacs. Forget coffee. The caffeinated hope of Thursday made her sit upright, blinking, heart percolating with anticipation. Friday was the day she would see him again. She had a gift for him, too: her first assignment, neatly typed and sitting in a precise stack on her desk. She couldn’t wait to give it to him, like how a child can’t wait to give a beloved teacher a fistful of the first dandelions of spring.

The experience of writing this paper was so different. Usually assignments prodded her methodical side. Stacks of notecards, a quick outline of her argument, and then careful, unassailable paragraphs with a beginning, middle, and an end. She was good at it, but when teachers told her so with laudatory grades she hesitated to take the praise. It wasn’t anything to be proud of, really. Just laying bricks.

This essay was different. Something poured out of her, something so intimate and passionate she didn’t realize how hard and fast her fingers were pounding the keys of her manual typewriter until the first knuckle of every finger felt like how a ballerina’s feet must feel after a night in toe shoes. No notecards. No outlines. There was only an urgent torrent of conviction, as sincere as a love letter and twice as fervent. When she pulled the last triumphant page out of the typewriter’s roller with a _zzzning!_ she felt weightless, timeless, spent. She stacked the pages neatly and smoothed the front page before realizing she hadn’t washed her fingers.

She wondered if he would notice.

The shower water was still cold at 4 am. She danced and shivered around the edges of the spray, trying to scrub herself while the lazy pipes took their time supplying hot water for the dorm’s first bather of the day. She didn’t have toiletries beyond dollar store soap and shampoo, but she tried to make the watery lather count.

A sudden wave of self-consciousness wowed up in her while drying off. She did not think much of her body, and did not think about it. But suddenly, seeing a narrow band of her reflection in the streak she’d wiped clean from the notebook-sized bathroom mirror, she saw her lank wet hair and her unplucked eyebrows and felt the weight of hypothetical eyes. Eyes she’d tried to sidestep her whole life with glum ponytails and too-big hoodies and sneakers she could run in, should she need to. “All dolled up” meant Chapstick. She wasn’t used to being seen.

 _But am I seen?_ she thought as she pulled her breasts into the utilitarian jogging bra that made them a non-issue to herself and to the world. It seemed like she had been, for one weightless moment. That nanosecond jolt of connection between her and Professor McTavish was water on her parched spirit. Its delirious shock carried her through the rest of Wednesday and Thursday and now Friday morning, when her class would meet again for its second weekly session. And he would be there.

And he would see her.

Maybe vanity made her pick the smallest t-shirt she owned from those she’d neatly folded in her drawer. It didn’t matter it would still be hidden under the sand-colored hoodie she cocooned her torso in every day. She would know she was wearing the small one, the boy’s shirt that could not be called fitted in any way but still clung to her more closely than the usual shirts she swam her body under. Jeans did not have an option. They were the same straight-legged size 6s she wore every day, same crew socks, same quick getaway sneakers. She brushed her teeth with tremendous care and pulled her damp hair into a folded bun at the base of her neck. That was it. She looked in the mirror. That was the best she could do.

She looked across the room, worry knitting her brow. The sight of her paper in its perfect stack soothed her unease. That was something of value to give him. Something she wanted to give. _Here_ , it would say. _This is me._ She longed to lay it in his hands.

She would, this morning.

The sky turned dawn lavender. Anticipation propelled her out onto campus, into a morning too cold for wet hair. The student union was just opening its doors by the time she got there. It was the end of the month and her dining card was low. She tucked her hood up around the cold nape of her neck and weighed whether she should chance buying a breakfast. Not that she had the stomach to eat it. The thought of how a warm bagel sandwich tucked into her hoodie pouch would feel on her cold fingers swayed her. Minutes later, a paper-wrapped sausage, egg, and cheese steamed happily against her palms in the belly muff of her pocket. The solid, almost living-thing feeling of it comforted her as she hiked across campus to the theater.

She wasn’t the first student in the theater, but she was the only one awake. A bored TA sat in the seat closest to the entrance. “Sign in,” he said, lifting the attendance clipboard to her.

Rey did. “Where do I hand in my paper?’

“You’re supposed to post it on the class blog. Or email it.”

Rey’s cheeks flushed. Stupid, she hadn’t read the syllabus. She rummaged her paper out of her bag. “I was hoping to give this to Professor McTavish.”

“He’s out today.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“I’ll give it to him,” said the TA. He lifted a lackadaisical hand.

Rey hesitated. “This is my only copy.” She bit her lip. “Where is his office?”

“On the third floor of the Yavin Building next door. I’m going there after class, I’ll just leave it there.”

 _And you’ll read it_ , thought Rey. She folded it in half reflexively.

“No, I’ll just take it there.”

The TA looked down at his phone. “Suit yourself.”

Rey walked up the steep theater steps, crestfallen. Suddenly that sandwich felt eminently edible. She unwrapped it and quietly munched. The sagey sausage and gooey American cheese on a toasty, yielding bagel did its best to comfort her as the rest of the class trickled in.

“Ok, listen up,” the TA finally said as he roused himself from his seat. “Professor McTavish is out today, he wanted me to read this.” He scrolled up on his phone and recited an email in monotone. “Hello class, sorry for the late change in plans. I’m not going to be able to make it for Friday’s class due to a last-minute situation.” Rey’s ears perked up. _Situation?_

“So let’s postpone our planned discussion of the beginning of the sound era for next Wednesday’s class,” the TA continued. “This gives us a chance to bridge the two eras and watch F.W. Murnau’s _Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans,_ from 1927. This is a silent-style movie, released with a synchronized soundtrack of music and special effects. Please take notes and come ready to discuss on Wednesday. If you have any questions you can ask the substitute TA --” – here the TA paused and gave a “that’s me” shrug – “or email them to me later. Again, sorry about the last minute change in plans, I’ll get grades to you on last week’s paper as soon as I can. Thanks.”

The TA put down his phone. “Does anyone have any questions?” There was a grunt in the back that sounded similar to _no_. “OK, whatever,” said the TA as he bounded up the stairs to the projection booth. “I’ll start the film.”

The lights dimmed and enveloped Rey in a warm velvety blackness. White credits on a black screen. The Man. The Wife. The Woman From The City. _This song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place_ , read the intertitle. _Life is much the same, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet._

Even from the first frame Rey could feel it. There was something sure about this movie. It had a muscle and confidence that the other silents didn’t have. Those early, clumsy experiments were feeling out a new medium, tentatively testing its limits. This movie gloried in the uncharted territory of what it could do, and how it could soar. The Woman From The City was bad news in bobbed hair. She blew smoke in the face of the bent crone reduced to polishing her jazz-age pumps. She was unvarnished evil, in its most capricious form: The Woman Who Does, Just Because She Can. And she can, to a simple farmer and his modest, weeping wife. The tragedy of it all tore at Rey, and she was in the thrall of this triangle’s impending doom before even ten minutes had passed.

Each image took her breath away. The Man, his back dark and broad against a gloomy sky set with a madness moon, walking through a swamp that felt like an external manifestation of his sexual obsession. His weakness, wrapped around his blameless wife’s doom, and his last minute contrition. The slow way she and he, with quiet, sincere grace, weighed their love against his sins and chose the better path. Tears welled in Rey’s eyes. How could a director in 1927 make a movie that still hurts so much? And redeems so much about what is good about men, women, love, grace, redemption – being alive?

Someone behind her snickered. Anger burned up in Rey but she chose to ignore it. She didn’t want to disrespect the movie by making more noise. She refocused her attention on the screen but the voice joined another behind her. They were texting, their phones dinging, giggling over some meme, their voices getting louder and louder. Rey was incensed. She hissed “Shhh!” over her shoulder. There was a moment of silence and then two snorting giggles. A spitball dinged against the back of Rey’s head. She jerked her head around.

“I’m trying to watch the movie,” she hissed.

“I’m _trying_ to watch the _movie_ ,” one of the girls sneer-mocked back. “Foster kid.”

A roaring, crackling force seared up in Rey. In the dark she had more power. She stood up and wheeled around, the silverlight of the screen behind her coursing around her in a halo of unholy potency. The offending girls’s eyes went wide as Rey opened her mouth and unleashed Pandora’s box –

“SHUT!

UUUUUUUUUUP!!!!”

The entire class turned in their seats, faces blanched by reflected light and fear reflex. This was not what they expected at an 8 am movie. They did not doubt for a moment that Rey, fists clenched, eyes burning, hunched forward as if ready to strike the chastened girls, was insincere about that they were going to shut up, and they were going to shut up _now_. Even the TA looked stunned.

Rey burned a wordless threat into each of the girls’ eyes in turn. They got the message. Rey flung herself around and sank back down in her seat. Only once she had sat down did she feel the shock reflex shudder of that sudden surge of adrenaline decaying in her system. She had never defended herself like that. No. She wasn’t just defending herself. She was defending a movie. It was beautiful and fragile and all it took was one idiot to break its spell for everyone. Beautiful and fragile things do not deserve to be broken. She stood up for it.

Nobody had ever done that for her.

Everyone behaved for the rest of the screening. The rancor in Rey’s veins subsided and she fell under the movie’s spell again with ease. The final shot of the Wife’s opening eyes. Her innocent relief. Their kiss. FINIS.

“Sign the attendance sheet if you haven’t already,” the bored TA said as they filed out. Rey didn’t notice her other classmates giving her a wide berth and askance glances. She was too focused on making a beeline out the door and to the next building over. The Yavin Building. Third floor.

She found his office immediately. It was easy to find it, with the pictures of Lon Chaney and Jean Harlow on the door. Even though the door was open a crack, she knocked on it respectfully.

“Professor McTavish?” she spoke into the crack of the door.

No answer.

With cautious fingertips, she pushed the door open.

Stepping into his office felt, on some level, like stepping inside of him. It was a small office, just enough for a desk and computer and some freestanding shelves bolted to the wall, higher up than she -- or really, anyone not his height -- could reach them. They must have been his addition, and they were crammed with well-loved books. She stood on tiptoe to read some of the titles. _Cult Movies. From Caligari to Hitler. Adventures in the Screen Trade. From Reverence to Rape. Story by Robert McKee. Hitchcock/Truffaut. Film as a Subversive Art._ The collective works of Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Jeanine Basinger, Penelope Gilliatt, Susan Sontag. If she could have reached them, she would have stroked their spines. _Maybe he’ll lend me one_ , she thought with a giddy shiver.

She scanned the clutter of his desk. Scattered administrative forms. Several stacks of videotapes and DVDs. A bold vintage poster for _Man With A Movie Camera_ over his desk, a jaunty flapper caught in saucy mid-backbend as the movie’s title swirled around her in a joyous vortex of Cyrillic letters. A snarling Godzilla toy looming over his computer monitor. A full cup of cold coffee. _Abandoned in a hurry_ , she realized. She hoped he was okay.

There was a framed picture of a boy on his desk, too. It was obvious it was of his son. Same deep hazel eyes, same crooked full-lipped grin. The distinctive nose and ears were whittled down by someone else’s mediating DNA. Same with the unruly auburn curls. It felt too intrusive to Rey to know this was his son. She felt as if she’d made an indelible mistake.

Her guilt reminded her that she’d only intended to drop off her paper, not to snoop. She pulled the paper from her bag and smoothed out where she’d folded it in half to keep it from prying eyes. She laid it carefully across his keyboard. It was here. He would see it soon. He would know.

She swallowed hard.

On sudden brave impulse she grabbed a pen from his desk and scribbled at the top

_I hope you are okay xo Rey_

and instantly regretted it – stupid, _stupid_ , too forward, not how you’re supposed to treat a professor . . .

. . . but maybe treat a Daddy . . .

Her want swelled up in her chest. “Yes,” she whispered aloud again, to the room, as if the _yes_ would linger like cigarette smoke and he would know its scent was here when he came back.

Before she knew what she was doing, she dropped the heavy anchor of her backpack to the ground and leaped up, knocked a book off the shelf, any book, caught it tight against her chest, grabbed her backpack. The treasure burned her chest as she ran home.


	3. Pre-Code Hollywood

“I got your papers back,” said Professor McTavish, “and, I’ll be honest . . . I’m not happy.”

Rey’s face flushed with doom. This was not a good way to start Wednesday’s class. A few minutes ago she was practically squirming waiting, _counting_ , aching through the teeth-chattering seconds before she got to see Professor McTavish again. It had been too long a wait. Every other class this week was an interminable drone. Every time she squirmed in her seat it became copiously clear how every bit of her slavered for his return.

“First of all, I heard there was an outburst during the screening on Friday. I can’t emphasize this enough: I’ve chosen every one of these films because they’re worthy of your attention and respect. And if you’re not willing to extend that respect, then I will ask you to withdraw from this class. Secondly,” he continued, “I was very clear about the instructions for your first paper. The assignment was to provide a critical analysis of a movie that had an influence on you. I got twenty-four movie summaries with an ending paragraph about whether you liked it. That is exactly what I told you _not_ to write.”

Rey swallowed hard. Something was on edge about him today. The warm avuncular vibe that made her tingle was gone. She didn’t know if it was something she’d done, or something going on in his life that was giving him an edge. It didn’t matter. She desperately wanted to please him, to earn his good graces again. She dropped her eyes in shame. She’d tried really hard to follow his instructions and give him a thoughtful analysis. It wasn’t just the idea of getting a bad grade at a task she knew she could do competently. It was the thought that she’d disappointed him. That made her burn with terror. But beneath the terror was a strange delight, an exquisite horror that enthralled her. He was so perfect, and she was so small. It almost felt deliciously right to have that smallness confirmed, like digging into your gums with taut dental floss until your entire jaw sang . . .

“In fact,” Professor McTavish continued, dropping the stack of papers onto the edge of the stage with an irritated _swack_ , “I got exactly one paper that earned a passing grade. And I’m going to read it for you right now, so no one will be confused about what I want ever again.”

All week Rey had desperately wanted to just gaze upon him again. Now, she couldn’t even look him in the eye. She blinked back the salty beginnings of some tears and took out her notebook with quivering hands. She would take notes on exactly what he wanted, and never disappoint him again.

The entire class was quiet. The feather rustle of him searching through the stack for the one worthy paper reverberated in the shamed silence. Rey could not look up. She focused all her being onto the mote-sized pinprick where the tip of her pencil lead made contact with the rough white of her notebook page. She wanted to crawl inside that infinitesimal dot, be so small the molecules of her shame could not follow her there –

“ _Green Harvest_ ,” read Professor McTavish in that rich, resonant voice. “ _The Rise of Skywalker_ vs. The Disney Machine.” The shock made Rey snap the point off her pencil. That was _her_ title.

_Hers._

Her paper was the exalted one.

A thrilled breathless buzzing filled her ears. Her heart pounded. The adrenalined joy coursing through her almost made her so numb with shock and relief that she couldn’t pay attention to the words coming out of that wide sensual mouth. But she heard it. He was reading her words aloud, words she’d poured so much of herself into. It was like he was rolling some part of her around inside his mouth. He continued to read, but she only started to comprehend her own words being recited back to her by the time he was halfway through:

**It makes no sense to “bring balance to the Force” by destroying one half of a powerful dyad. Lucas may have borrowed the idea of the Force from Eastern philosophy, but by the time his concepts made its way to Disney, the attending concepts of dark and light being complementary, subjective descriptions – as graphically depicted in the yin yang – gave way to a Judeo-Christian dualism, where “good” is a divine absolute destined to prevail over unnatural “evil”.**

**The moment The Rise of Skywalker could have chosen a more nuanced exploration of its stated theme of “the dark side” (i.e. human’s post-Fall sinful nature) was to courageously allow Chewbacca to die during the struggle to wrest control of the ship. If the filmmakers had allowed that to happen, that opened a place of moral reckoning for the film’s heroine: if my inherent evil has caused pain and suffering, even in circumstances where I operate in good faith, perhaps there is room for forgiveness and empathy for a so-called “evil” character who has done the same? That would open up an ending where symbolically, she would come to acceptance of her own dark side and in doing so destroy its hold over her, and by extension the dyad.**

**But they chose not to, and so presented us with a movie with no moral courage. Its heroine is not a capital-H Hero, in the Joseph Campbellian mold: she may face travails and challenges, but she pays for none of it with her own flesh. She is given everything: supernatural abilities, substitute family, loyal friends, romantic devotion, and eventual third-act triumph, without a single sacrifice on her part. It is not true apotheosis if, at the moment of death, a hero is resurrected by a more heroic character’s sacrifice. (Was Judas responsible for Jesus’s resurrection? And if he was, who would we believe was the real hero of the Easter story?) She’s a credit card hero, spending any treasure other than her own.**

**It’s hard to calculate what Disney et. al. anticipated after the release of The Rise of Skywalker. Did they genuinely believe this was the most satisfying ending possible to a saga whose movies have spanned almost half a century, and have captured our collective imagination in a way no other modern phenomenon has? Did they anticipate – or even care about – the tremendous and genuine outcry of grief from an overwhelmingly female fandom over the unjust death of Kylo Ren? Have they witnessed how a staggering torrent of fan fiction and fan art is filling the void, finally voicing the future that was fandom’s hope for the movie’s dyad: love, contentment, family, a future – finally, inner peace? Does that bruise their conscience? Or is their focus so cynical that they follow the axiom that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” as long as it puts money in the Mouse’s coffers?**

**If they really cared, this is how the movie would have ended: Chewbacca died. Rey has a clarifying moment after coming to grips with her own culpability. She joins Kylo in the final battle. Their dyad is a strength, not a weakness, and it defeats the Emperor. The cost is that both die, in each others arms. But in that moment, every sentient being becomes Force sensitive. The “balance to the Force” is not a balance between dark and light: it’s a balance between it being something focused in a select few vs. in all living things. A newly Force sensitive cadre of rebels come to Kylo and Rey’s aid. They use their collective powers to revive them. The final scene is as it stands, with Rey burying the lightsabers in the desert, symbolically ending the war that had defined Star Wars. The fecundity of this reborn world is symbolized by her being pregnant.**

**The loss of this much more satisfying conclusion is not just sorrowful for women. It’s deeply insulting. There was much ballyhoo over the sequels having a heroine at their focus. “What a big day for women,” the thinking went. But is Rey a woman? She is female, that’s certain. But is she matured emotionally, psychologically, sexually? Does she live with overlapping, urgent contradictions in her wants and needs that frustrate and confound even herself? Is her experience of life rooted in a body that makes her vulnerable? Does she possess the lurid, edgeless, full untamed power of a woman’s sexuality?**

**It’s not a surprise that Star Wars is not ready to create a heroine who’s actually a woman. It is a universe that is suspicious and fearful of sex, marriage, and motherhood. Padme’s downfall begins with marriage and ends with death in childbirth. Jedis must choose celibacy. Han and Leia divorce. Their son revives the Dark Side. There are less than nine passionate kisses in over 22 hours of cinema, and no mention of any human sexuality other than Padme’s declaration that she’s pregnant. (Even Anakin was a virgin birth.) In short, nothing good comes of eros in the canon world of Star Wars. This is where fan fiction has filled a gaping and hungry gap.**

**Disney thought they could make women happy by giving them a movie about a stunted little girl. It is the ultimate in condescension. Women deserve better than The Rise of Skywalker. And Kylo – brave, noble, abused, undeserving Kylo, the only character capable of truly loving someone body and soul -- deserves a better movie.**

He stopped reading, and exhaled, as if the act of reading it had done something subtle and profound to him.

“There’s thought,” he finally said “There’s care. There’s focus.” He looked down at the paper again. His Adam’s apple tightened, as if he was carefully swallowing some of what he wanted to say. “Extraordinary,” he finally spoke, and placed the paper gently on the top of the stack.

There was absolute silence in the theater. Rey couldn’t breathe.

Then he clapped his hands together. “Let’s move on. Pre-Code Hollywood.” He leapt up onto the stage again and uncapped the dry erase marker. “Who can tell me the movie ratings currently in use? Yes?” He pointed to a raised hand in the back row.

“G,” the student said.

“G. Right. For General Audiences. Give us another one, someone else.”

“R.”

“R. Restricted. Yes,” he said, pointing.

“PG.”

“PG. And PG-13. Yes?”

“X,” said someone in the back. The class snickered.

“X,” Professor McTavish wrote on the board. “And XXX, used only for hardcore pornography. We’ll get back to that later.” Rey’s cheeks flushed at the casual way he said that. “One more.” The class was stumped and silent.

Professor McTavish wrote it on the board. “NC-17.” He drew a circle around X, XXX, and NC-17 and stepped back. “What do these ratings tell us?”

“What bad stuff is in movies,” said someone.

“Whether a movie is okay for kids,” someone else said.

“Yes, and yes. But there’s one more thing – something that has changed over time. What is it?”

The class was silent. Rey racked her brain. The firefly of the answer was hovering inside her, a tantalizing _something_ that she couldn’t quite trap between her hands. She bit her lip and looked up –

\-- and Professor McTavish was looking directly at her.

Her heart caught in her throat but she forced herself to boldly return his gaze. There was something sly and encouraging in the look he was giving her, a shared joke. _Come on_ , it said. _I know you know this. Dig deep._

The firefly --

Rey raised her hand.

“Yes,” Professor McTavish said. His eyes shone with the same bold wink.

“What a culture believes is right and wrong,” she said.

“Bingo.” He pointed an arrow to the circle corralling the three forbidden ratings. “And what American culture believes is wrong is most often contained inside these three. So what is wrong?”

This time everyone knew the answer but no one wanted to be the first to say it. Rey included.

“Sex,” answered Professor McTavish. “Explicit sex. Sex between partners other than a man and a woman. Specific sex acts.” He stabbed the circle with his dry erase marker. “Sex that values women’s pleasure.”

Rey’s clit flushed with excitement at the thought of Professor McTavish valuing her pleasure. It was not a concept that she had experienced much of in life. The only time she truly felt it was in her own explorations of her body. This had been a banner year in that regard. Alone, in the quiet shell of her dorm room, she’d gotten to know the secret delights of her anatomy in a way that hadn’t been possible before – not in crowded foster homes or under the thumb of repressive caretakers. She’d learned not only how fiercely rubbing her clit could pump out breath-holding, foot-clenching orgasms. She’d learned the subtle infinite nuances of all the secret dots of pleasure tucked into her folds. The way how less is more, how she didn’t need to assault the clitoris with hard pressure, how it would rise to meet the softest touch with more eagerness. It even had an underside that was just as sensitive, and she could find that space under the arch of it in a soft, rocking pinch. And the ways she could touch herself: tiny Morse code taps on that sweet 11 o’clock spot on her hood, sliding the V of two wet fingers low in the gully on either side of it, even gently flexing her pelvic muscles so that the hard true nub of her clit could rub itself on the plump hood that contained it. She’d gone to bed many nights like that, softly rocking her body against itself as she rolled her fingers around her nipples, imagination aflame with thoughts of Professor McTavish and what he looked like under his clothes, how his kisses tasted, how his mouth would feel on her doing everything she was doing to herself. She couldn’t imagine these things with concrete detail. These were things no man had ever done to her. But what she lacked in accuracy she made up for with imaginative longing, and the sweet coruscations they rewarded her with were the stuff of contented sleep.

Professor McTavish pointed to the X. “The X rating was created in 1968 to give accurate content warnings to movies like _Midnight Cowboy_ and _A Clockwork Orange_. But unlike the other ratings, the MPAA neglected to trademark the X, so any film could self-apply it rather than have it applied by the ratings board. That led to the X being adapted by pornographic filmmakers, who eventually mutated it into the XXX rating. That caused confusion,” he said, drawing arrows between the X and the XXX, “between serious-minded movies with explicit content and mere pornography. So in 1990 the MPAA created the NC-17 rating,” he said, drawing an arrow, “as a way of distinguishing content.” He capped his marker. “How long have these ratings existed?”

Someone raised their hand. “Like, forever? Because old-timey movies are like, tamer than the movies today?”

Rey knew that was untrue because of her own sin. The book she’d knocked down from Professor McTavish’s shelf was _Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema._ Any residual regret she felt from taking it from him got lost while devouring it cover to cover over the weekend. She didn’t know that, between 1930 and 1934, American movies were explicit and amoral in a way that wouldn’t return until the social changes of the late 60s. It was hard to believe there were four hidden short years in American movies where anything was possible: sexually voracious, scruple-free heroines, violent gangsters, a glamorous black-and-white world where crime pays and sluts win and everyone’s thrilled in the end. All tucked away inside a forgotten pocket of Hollywood. _The Pre-Code years are the clitoris of film history_ , she thought.

“Think about that answer while we watch the next movie,” said Professor McTavish as he dimmed the lights. “We’re going to watch _Baby Face_ – and we’re going to watch the original uncut version, as it originally played in theaters in 1933. I think you might be surprised at what ‘old-timey’ movies can get up to.”

The luminous movie started. But Rey couldn’t concentrate. She was too worked up, thinking about Professor McTavish’s wink and how he spoke of women’s pleasure and her own XXX explorations on the X of her clit. She wanted to slip inside the gorgeous pearl-grey screen of _Baby Face_ and imagine what kind of a life she could have inside it, slut triumphant, awash in a world where a willingness to fuck was coin of the realm and she was sitting on a treasure . . .

From her perch in the theater’s upper rows she could she could see the outline of Professor McTavish’s salt-and-pepper hair lit up in a silvery corona by _Baby Face_ ’s light. Barbara Stanwyck, Erie slattern, fending off pinches and catcalls from dirty day laborers in her father’s beer hall. Pouring coffee on the hands of grabby men. Then the one good thing any man has ever given her placed in her hands: Nietzche’s _Will to Power_. _If you stay in this town you are lost_ , warns its lender. _You let life defeat you. You don’t fight back. A woman young and beautiful like you could get anything she wants in the world._ Her force awakens.

Rey focused all her attention on that corona of light around the eclipse of Professor McTavish’s back. No classmate was in a row higher than hers. No one would see. The madness and wrongness of what she was about to do sent a pounding thrill through her. She laid her notebook over her lap and shifted in her seat to disguise how she separated her knees. Her breath was tight as she crept her right hand under her notebook with a snakehandler’s incremental care. She could place one finger right on the double-folded knot of denim in the dead center of the crotch of her jeans. If she crooked the fingers above and below it, softly, softer than how you’d scratch behind a cat’s ears, the thrumming flesh of her pussy could feel its tiny footprint of pressure just fine.

Something about the microtingle of sensation each stroke percolated in her clit reared up bold thoughts about what she’d like to do to him, with him, on him. The vital heat of her cheek pressed up against his back, feeling his cattle-sized ribs expand with each breath. Her arms creeping around a waist that was unpaunched but still girthed too wide for her arms to touch at his navel. The small of his neck, and the fine hairs there in thick skin. And his face against the back of her neck, too, that formidable profile nudging her with every plush kiss, just as firmly as what nudged her between her thighs laying beside him. She imagined parting those thighs, feeling the drag of his hard cock between their tender insides, shifting her hips to offer him where she was wet and molten, that shocking gasp as he penetrated her, her ass pressed against his hard-boned hips as he rocked torturously into her . . .

He turned around and looked towards Rey’s dark quadrant of the theater.

Rey’s heart did a backflip. It was as if her want had called him.

It was hard to see if he was looking directly at her. Rey didn’t stop. Her finger kept crooking at the sweet spot beneath her jeans. Knowing he might be looking at her sent involuntary clenches up inside her, like the dancing violet zap of a Jacob’s Ladder.

She spread her knees just the tiniest brave bit open. Her pupils adjusted. She could see the whites of his eyes now.

He _was_ looking at her.

With all the courage she could muster, she returned his gaze. Connecting stare to stare for one, two, three weightless, bold seconds. Could he see her? See what she was doing?

She slid her notebook one coy inch back on her lap. She didn’t know to what extent the light of the screen reflected against her, if she was more visible to him than he was to her. The thought of being on display to him thrilled her. As if he were commanding her _stroke yourself. Let’s see it. Don’t pretend to be shy, you darling little slut. I know you do this. And now you’re going to show me. You’re going to do your naughty little secret right in front of me. That’s right. Spread your knees so I can see everything. Get that pussy wet for me._

_I have plans for you._

Slowly, Professor McTavish turned his head back to face the screen. She saw his wide shoulders rise and fall with the smallest tight sigh. Then he was still.

 _The End. A Warner Bros. Picture._ The lights came up. The class filed out. Rey hugged her notebook to her chest as she filed out past him with the rest of the class.

He touched her shoulder. She stopped, wide-eyed. Standing next to him, the closest she’d ever yet been to him, she saw the top of her head barely came up to his sternum.

“Rey, I need to talk to you,” he said. “Not here.” He pointed to the soundproof room in the back of the theater, all the way at the top. “In the projection booth.”


	4. Film Noir

“I know you took that book,” said Professor McTavish.

They were standing in the projection booth at the back of the theater. It was a tight, cosseted womb of a space, filled with humming black racks of DVD and Blu-Ray and VHS decks and two different projectors: 16mm and 35mm. The slate-grey berber carpet that blanketed walls and ceiling and floor trapped the warmth. The basket-weave soundproofing foam hung across the back wall ate all the ambient sound. It was so quiet she knew he could hear her shallow inhale as she tried to breathe.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Mortified she crouched on the floor to unzip her backpack. She pulled the purloined book out and held it out to him in her shaking hand, too ashamed to return his gaze.

He didn’t snatch it back. He took it from her grip carefully and laid it on the counter beside him. She noticed stacks of DVDs and Blu-Rays piled up nearby, presumably for future classes.

“You know I would have lent it to you,” he said. Then, after a beat: “What did you think of it?”

Rey swallowed hard. “I thought it was interesting,” she finally choked out. Stupid, stupid, stupid. _Tell him what you really think. That you smelled the pages while you read it. That it made you feel giddy to have a part of him._ She _did_ read it. It _was_ interesting. But how could she describe the way the lawless landscape of the Pre-Code movie feel? Like it was giving her permission to do bad things . . .

He didn’t say anything. He looked out the booth’s wide one-way windows, as if parsing his thoughts. He turned back to her.

“Your paper was excellent,” he said.

Rey blushed and bowed her head. “Thank you.”

“You think about movies differently than anyone here. What are your future plans? Going to Hollywood?”

“I guess I never really thought about it,” she confessed.

“What’s your focus here, at school?”

“I don’t really have one. I just . . .” She trailed off, trying to think how to explain the next part without sounding pathetic. “I thought it would be a good idea. And I needed somewhere to go.”

Professor McTavish’s brow furrowed. She swallowed hard and continued.

“I . . . I’m a foster kid. And if you age out the state pays for college. And if you don’t have anywhere to go . . .”

“. . . They get you housing, too,” he finished her thoughts.

“Yeah,” she admitted, exhaling shakily. She hated telling this part. It just reminded her of how no one wanted her. “It’s just . . .” Something broke loose in her, a secret she’d been aching to tell someone, anyone. “When I’m writing about a movie, or even just _being_ in a movie, in the dark of the theater, I just feel powerful. Like I’m free, finally . . . and I can do anything I want.”

This time it was Professor McTavish’s turn to swallow hard. She saw his Adam’s apple jump with the effort.

“I saw what you were doing,” he said.

Rey stiffened in shame and horror. She closed her eyes and wished to drop dead.

Neither of them said anything. The soundproofed absolute silence of the projection booth hummed with the taut electricity between them

“I don’t want you to write a paper on _Baby Face_ ,” he said, slowly and carefully. There was a timbre to his voice she’d never heard before. It was not the voice he used to speak to the class. Even though he stood two feet away from her it was a voice that insinuated itself into her ears as if his mouth was almost against them.

Rey ducked her head to the side, as if slapped. She still couldn’t look at him, or speak.

He reached for the stack of DVDs and shuffled through them. He handed one out to her.

“Take it,” he whispered in that demonic timbre.

She took it with trembling hands.

_Belle de Jour._

“I want you to write an essay about this,” he said, with great and pointed care. “And I want you to be very clear about what you think about its themes.” His dark eyes bored into her with an unambiguous clarity. “I want you to explain it to me so I absolutely know your position on it.”

“How many pages?” she whispered.

“As many as you need,” he answered. “Due the next time I see you.”

“I’ll do it,” she nodded, swallowing hard.

“Good girl.” Something about the way he said that watered a long-withered flower inside her. She needed to wind her hands against each other inside the pocket of her hoodie to restrain them from reaching out and touching him.

“You need to go now,” he said with a stern finality. She knew in a flash that it was because he was thinking the same thing.

She whirled around, turned the doorknob, and flew down the auditorium stairs.

\------

How am I going to watch this? thought Rey. Thursday afternoon the undergrad library was chockablock with computers, but Rey felt a twinge in her conscience as she scanned the endless tables of beige monitors. She didn’t know what was on this DVD. It felt like a betrayal of Professor McTavish’s instructions to watch this in a public space. He’d assigned it to her specifically, to no one else in the class, and his instructions -- _I want you to be very clear about what you think about its themes_ \-- had a very pointed, heart-pounding subtext.

Rey clutched the DVD a little closer to her chest. _I’ll protect your secrets_ , she promised.

A librarian wearing a fluttery beige blouse and kind smile approached her. “A/V booth?” she smiled.

Rey blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“Do you need an A/V booth? For your movie?” She waved to a back corridor with the words MEDIA STUDIES hung over the door frame. Rey had never noticed it before.

“Oh,” stuttered Rey. “Yes, I guess I do.”

The librarian smiled and lifted a jingling ring of keys from under her desk. “Follow me.” She sashayed through the doorway, Rey close behind.

Rey gasped as she realized where she was. There was an entire wing of the library devoted to moving images. She had no idea this was here. She followed the librarian through a twisting labyrinth of towering shelving racks of obsolete video formats, decks, reels of film, VHS tapes, DVDs, Blu-Rays, Laserdiscs, every imaginable format. Their collective presence had a very particular scent: dusty and nostalgic but slightly vinegary, a perfume hovering above the same warm static electricity smell of a just-carpeted room.

“I knew there was a Media Studies department here,” she gasped. “But I didn’t realize it was such a big deal.”

“Oh yes,” the librarian smiled sweetly. “I’m in love with this collection. We’ve got some rare gems here. Back in the ‘70s,” she continued, “when I was a student, we had a Film Society here. It was a very powerful voice on campus. It’s gone by the wayside – everyone wants to watch movies alone at home, not sitting on the campus green, sharing a joint and a big outdoor screen with everyone you know on a warm summer night.” She winked. “I plead the Fifth about the joint, by the way.”

Rey smiled. “That actually sounds heavenly,” she said. Not that she would know what to do with a joint if someone passed it to her. But sitting out under the stars, your head in someone’s blue-jeaned lap as you absorbed the trippy finale light and color sprawl of _2001: A Space Odyssey_ . . .

The librarian unlocked a closet-sized room for Rey. Chair, decks, monitor, headphones. “What have you got?” she asked, craning her neck. “Oooh – _Belle de Jour_. Enjoy,” she said with a wink. “If you need help, my name’s Joy. I’ll be at the front desk.”

“Thank you,” said Rey, and settled into the seat, the door clicking shut behind her. The Blu-Ray machine swallowed the chrome disc. She clapped the heavy padded headphones over her ears and waited.

A carriage rides through the stately European countryside. The tumble of horses’ hooves and the chiming of their livery. And a divine blonde, possessed of a precise beauty. She looks how women imagine themselves in their happiest fantasies. _Shall I tell you a secret, Severine?_ says her suave husband as he kisses her hand. _I love you more every day._ The footmen drag her from the coach. They escort her roughly through the woods until she falls, her stockings tearing upon her flailing legs as they drag her on hard forest floor to where she will be bound. Her husband strips her, gags her, ties her hands like a slave. He relishes the slap of the coachmen’s whips against her bared shoulders and her betrayed yelps and pleas almost as much as she does. _What are you thinking about, Severine?_ says her husband as he turns out the bathroom light, interrupting her fantasy. She snaps out of her dream state and half-lies to him. _About you_.

_About you._

Rey’s pulse pounded so hard in her flushed cheeks it almost felt like a sunburn. The screening room was small and quiet and soundproofed and no eyes would have seen what she chose to do to herself inside its confines. But that was not his instruction. His instruction was to watch, and think, and explain to him, in perfect detail. Even as her heart thrummed at the tremendous surrogate relief of Severine’s debasement, her greater thrill was knowing she was carrying out his directions. In unambiguous absolutes. In a way that would please him.

Oh, please let it please him.

She took no notes. She didn’t need to. This movie threaded itself into her muscle and marrow and soul. It was a part of her now. The box and its mysterious buzz. Marcel’s gold teeth. The cruelty of his eyebrows and sleek leather coat. Mud flung at an angel. Her thoughts knitted themselves together furiously. By the final scene – _thinking of you, Severine_ – they were an unfurling tapestry of long-unvoiced wants and pleading needs.

That night the paper poured out of her in one long prayer. She did not touch herself as she typed. She denied herself even squirming on the hard seat of her chair. Professor McTavish had not said that giving into her arousal was part of her task. Her fingers were assigned only to type every secret thought and that is what they did, pounding hard inky letter dents into each sheet of paper with masochistic, jackhammer speed. When it was done she suddenly gulped a great lungful of air, like a surfacing drowner, not realizing how she’d been holding her breath in the sprint of its creation.

She fell into her bed, delirious, in the witching hour. Everything below her navel clenched in stagnant want. A quick satisfying exploration with her fingers would relieve the cramp, unlock the subtle tender muscles that had stayed plush and hot and ready for too long. She closed her eyes and furrowed her brow. The paper was complete. She had fulfilled his instructions without veering off into erotic distraction. Surely she was free to enjoy her own body now . . .

_Due the next time I see you._

She bit her lip. That had been her instruction. She looked over at her desk. There the paper sat. Not with him. No assignment is complete until it’s in the teacher’s hands.

The frustration was causing her genuine distress now. It would be more possible to sleep with a migraine. But something in her stayed her hand. Maybe it was watching Severine, and the thrill she found in debasement. In denial. In surrender.

She flipped over, trapping her hands under her chest, and willed herself to sleep.

\-----

The shriek of her alarm stabbed Rey awake. She sat at the edge of her bed in yesterday’s clothes, nodding out, heart pounding. It took all her willpower to shake off her interrupted sleep cycle and ready herself for class. There wouldn’t be time for breakfast in the cafeteria. _It’s the end of the month_ , thought Rey. _I don’t even know if I still have money on that card_. There was an apple and a stick of string cheese in the mini fridge. She tucked both into her bag. One would be for breakfast and one would be for lunch. Supper might just be more sleep.

She made it to the auditorium on time and waited in the same cattle call line of drowsy students turning in their papers. She tucked hers face down into the stack at the edge of the stage before climbing the stairs to her usual high perch seat.

Professor McTavish came in only a few minutes late and predictably, her heart jumped at the sight of him. Today he wore a well-loved black cable knit sweater over the usual plaid button down, its collar peeking over the knitted neckline. It looked absolutely stunning on him – sinister and cuddly at the same time – and had the added bonus of making the silver in his salt and pepper hair sing. He had a coffee in his hand and – Rey noticed with relief – the crow’s feet twinkle had returned to his eyes. Whatever mysterious crisis had troubled him last week must have resolved itself. He caught her eye briefly and the sly, crooked, unabashed grin he shot her for just one tasty moment made her shiver with pleasure.

“Thanks for your papers,” he said as he took a sip of his coffee. “I’ll enjoy reading them this weekend. Just wanted to make a quick announcement: tonight there’s a one night only screening of one of my favorite movies, _Gun Crazy_ , at the Bijou Theater in Finnsville – not too far from here, if you drive. It starts at 7 pm. I’ll be going, and if you choose to I’ll be happy to accept any extra credit papers from you about it. Don’t think you can cheat by streaming it at home, though.” He wagged his finger. “I’ll know if you were there. A movie like this, you have to see in the theater.”

 _Yes_ , thought Rey. _I’ll do it_. Never mind that she didn’t know how she was going to scrounge up the bus fare to get to Finnsville. There had to be a way.

“And that’s perfect,” said Professor McTavish, “because today we’ll be starting our discussion of film noir.” He went on explaining how _film noir_ meant “dark film”, how it wasn’t just detective movies lit from behind venetian blinds, that it was an entire genre of cynical, brutal movies reflecting post-war pessimism in dangerous chiaroscuro. But Rey wasn’t paying any attention. Her thoughts were dancing ahead to tonight. Maybe, if the other people in the class weren’t crowding around him, she’d get to sit in the same row as him. Maybe he’d have something complimentary to say about her paper.

Maybe something else might happen.

She swallowed hard. The pulsing tension coiling around her frustrated pussy was almost as tender as a bruise. And the paper was in his hands. Or on the stage, near his hands. So she could let go. The lights would go out soon, so he could show the clips he’d selected. No one would see her.

Only him, if he were looking.

But something in her wouldn’t let herself do it. She watched him from the audience with the alacrity of a herding dog waiting for the quick flick of a command from her handler. She didn’t even know what that command would be. But she kept her eyes on him hungrily, hoping to spot it when she saw it, hoping she’d even know how badly she needed it –

He paused mid-lecture and looked at her. There was an entire paragraph of information in that burst of eye contact. The devil was in those charmingly crinkled eyes. _I know the permission you are looking for_ , the look said, _and I deny you. I deny you in the very worst way. You have no proof that I have read the want in your eyes correctly. Which I certainly have. Because I want you tender and swollen and aching and I want the next release you feel to be under my touch and none other. But try telling that to the judge. So I will let you ache and bite your cuticles and second-guess yourself about whether I have been clear about my wishes. But just try and touch yourself. The guilt will overwhelm you._

_If I don’t overwhelm you first._


	5. The Moviegoing Experience

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: brief mention of racist language by bad people

“That’s all for today,” shouted Professor McTavish as the lights came back on and the students shuffled out. “Remember, a two page biography of a film noir director of your choice, and _Gun Crazy_ at 7 pm. See you there?” he said, casually lobbing the question to every student in the room in a way that deflected its real target. Rey felt the question land squarely where it belonged. Its impact made her feel naked. She nodded nervously, head ducked, anxious to get out of the room and out of his company before she did something rash. She felt the heat of his gaze subtly track her before another student interrupted him to plead her case for a late paper.

Yes. Of course she would go. But how? Either anxiety over the question or the cold through her thin hoodie made her teeth chatter as she hustled across campus. It was the last day of the month. Her meager stipend wouldn’t respawn until the 1st. _Can you walk to Finnsville? Can you hitchhike?_ Even if she had a car, she wouldn’t know how to drive it. Getting your licensce: just another life milestone that gets lost in the shuffle when you’re shuttled to caretaker after caretaker. When every eight months you start from the bottom as someone else’s problem. _And even if I made it there_ , she thought, _where’s the money for a ticket? If you have a student ID, do they just –_

_Pzing!_

“Ow!” yelped Rey. Something horsefly-sharp had just bitten into her cheekbone at high velocity. Low brutal laughter behind her. She instinctively touched her face for blood. The torturous _zink-a-zink-a-zink-a-zzzzrrrrrrrrrrt!_ clatter of a coin spinning with increasing suspense on the concrete below her.

He’d thrown a coin at her. The boy with the square jaw and the trust fund smirk and the date rape guffaw had just winged her with a quarter at a velocity perfected on the football field. His friends laughed. The girl Rey’d silenced in class was one of them. They sputtered with glee and held onto each other at the sight of Rey blinking away the pain.

“Oh, shit, shit, see if she picks it up,” one of them hissed. “Feeding time for the poor little charity case.”

The hurt and humiliation seared up in Rey. This never changed. The faces changed and the tactics changed but the daily spearing by fate . . . The heads up quarter mocked her, fat and shiny on the sidewalk. It seemed like George Washington and his pathetic little ponytail were egging her on, too.

A quarter.

_Raining from heaven._

Rey set her jaw. She stooped slowly, never breaking eye contact with her tormentors as she scooped it up from the ground. It singed like a torn muscle to watch them explode in chimpanzee glee at her self-debasement. She never looked away.

 _Come at me_ , she taunted to herself.

“Dude, hit her again.” Rummaging deep in pockets. “Shit, try a penny.” That hit like a hard flick below her collarbone. She picked it up with the same defiant gravity.

“She stooped for a _fucking_ penny, did you see that?

“Didn’t know she was Jewish.”

“Do it again, do it again.”

“I only have quarters.”

“Doesn’t matter, dude, _do_ it!”

A whole fistful this time, a cluster bomb of spare change aiming for the eyes. _Yes, yes_ , she thought. The bullet smack of each coin against her flesh felt good, purifying. She would suffer anything to see Professor McTavish tonight. Pain alchemized into something closer to ecstatic martyrdom inside her. Let them rain cruel metal down on her. Every sting and humiliation was a step closer to tonight’s grace.

She chased down every spinning jumping bean coin and scraped them up in her fist. Students walked by, absorbed in their phones, their comforts, their own petite dramas. Many saw her but no one helped her. She stood her ground. She jostled the metal in her palm and weighed its worth. Finnsville felt closer.

_Come on._

_Almost there._

“Yo, got a squaw.”

“Toss that bitch.”

A glint of gold. Incoming.

The Sacajawea dollar caught her under the eye. Its english cut a throwing star nick out of the soft skin there. First blood.

Bus fare.

Rey grabbed her bag and ran at rabbit speed, hard enough to taste blood in her lungs, fast enough to outrun the stench of their laughter. She willed the sobbing tightness in her throat down into her muscles, burned up the calories of her hurt like rocket fuel. By the time she got to her dorm’s front door she was ready to vomit from exertion. The tickle that rose up in her throat was instead laughter, a sudden peal of effortless relieved joy.

\-----

Finnsville was two bus transfers away. Rey lay her head on the chill window glass of the final ride and closed her eyes to the lavendering dusk outside. Her stomach calmed enough to allow her to eat her cheese stick. It distracted her stomach for 45 minutes and then the familiar famished gnaw started again. What shut it up was the clenching butterflies of how she would see him again. In a theater. Where anything is possible.

She thought about her paper, what she’d written to him, the assignment she’d fulfilled as explicitly as her good sense would allow. Its words rolled around in her head as she dozed off . . .

**But despite Belle de Jour’s status as a high water mark for BDSM in film (miles above the** _**Fifty Shades of Grey** _ **franchise and on a par with arthouse exemplars** _**The Night Porter** _ **,** _**Blue Velvet** _ **, and** _**The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant** _ **), Severine is a curious role model for women with dark sexual tastes –if she can be said to be a role model after all. In many ways, she is a tragedy – someone who is doomed, and dooms everyone around her, with the cruel thanotic eroticism that powers her search for debasement. Indeed, the fantasy sequence at the end, where she imagines her paralyzed and blinded husband as whole, healthy, and adoring of her once more, is the least consistent with Severine’s character. The guilt and horror she feels over how her infidelity and perverse impulses have utterly destroyed a good man emotionally, professionally, spiritually, physically is what triggers the ultimate masochistic high she has been yearning for – a high her conscience ironically cannot permit her to enjoy, instead retreating into a fantasy of absolution.**

**But perhaps Severine’s tragedy is not the usual trope of the “fallen woman” receiving her just desserts. If it is, in fact, a cautionary fable, it is not one told from bourgeoisie society’s point of view. Severine is debased, desecrated, and destroyed because her desire is leashed only to itself. The tautological impossibility of a woman’s desire for submission being satisfied by binding to itself is like curing hunger with hunger, madness with madness, need with need – a swallowing, futile ouroboros. Mainstream mores tout the cure of redevoting herself to her husband and ignoring her desire, subsuming her masochism under the duties of respectable wifehood. But that is a joyless and impossible existence whose only consequence will be despair over a wasted, unlived life.**

**Critics never mention this briefest of inserts: Severine knocking over a bottle of cologne in the bathroom. Severine sitting down in sudden shock. And then, without comment, her childhood memory of being fondled by a grubby adult man. Who knows what she has endured in her girlhood? Where was her father to protect her? Or, more sinisterly,** _**was** _ **that her father? The firm paternal hand that Severine craves has its genesis in that moment, and her tragedy is that she never finds it – not in her bland vanilla husband, not in the boorish louts who leer at her, poor lamb, not in brutal Marcel, and not in her final servitude to her invalid mate.**

**But what Severine needs – a prescription for satisfaction perhaps beyond the bounds of even an imagination as feverish as Bu** **ñ** **uel’s -- is spelled out in the very beginning, in the opening fantasy of her husband’s hand-kissing adoration before he supervises the bondage, flagellation, and rape she craves. A woman like Severine doesn’t need a secret life as a prostitute, or the obsessive attention of a dangerous criminal, even though in her aimlessness and confusion that’s what she gets. What she needs is the firm hand of someone who truly loves her, who sees past her surface sheen in a way no one else does (not even herself), who understands the contradictions and subtleties of her convoluted desires more completely than she ever could, and who is willing to undertake the hard work of excavating her full capacity for passion and pleasure.**

**If she’d had a lover who would have indulged her fetishes because in his wisdom he knew how to autoclave her true capacity for ecstasy out of that starting point, maybe she would not have come to her unhappy end. If he’d found her, and saw her truth, and if she’d had the courage to speak her desire aloud and submit to his trustworthy carnal will, she would have found happiness, and in that the fertile planting ground of true love.**

**There is nothing she wants more.**

The bus hissed to a stop and Rey awoke with a jerk. “Finnsville,” bellowed the driver. “Last stop.” Rey shouldered her bag and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Two blocks down, the curliqued neon of the Bijou’s antique marquee glowed like an Art Deco oasis.

 _And he is here._ Standing in front of the theater, under the starburst of light bulbs on the marquee’s wide underside. Crowned by a rakish tan fedora, reading a folded _Cineaste,_ sipping another tall coffee.

Alone.

Rey hastened her steps without meaning to. She neared closer and closer to him, praying for that electric moment he would lift his head and see her and greet her with that crooked, guileless grin –

and then he did

and it was even more lovely than she’d imagined.

“Rey,” he said, genuine delight sugaring his baritone. “You made it.”

Rey nodded furiously, cheeks hurting from the smile she couldn’t suppress. “I just really wanted to come tonight,” she said breathlessly.

“Have you seen _Gun Crazy_ before?”

“No. But I’ve read about it. I hope it’s better than my imaginary movie—“ she started, realizing she was going to have to explain herself.

He spoke first. “—Where when you finally get to see a movie you’ve read so much about, it’s got to fight with the movie you were imagining for so many years?” He chuckled. “I’ve got those too.”

“I thought I was the only one,” she said, amazed and relieved.

“Which exceeded your expectations and which weren’t as good?”

“Erm . . . I don’t want to admit this, but . . . “

He cut her off. “ _Citizen Kane_ , right? Not as good as you thought?”

“Actually, I was going to say _The Godfather_ ,” she confessed. “I like Scorsese better.”

“What do you like about him?”

Rey thought. This was a hard question. He took a sip of his coffee and let her think, waiting patiently as she worried her lower lip in her teeth, trying to distill a feeling into something she could explain. Never taking his eyes off of her.

“People trying so hard to be good,” she finally said. “When obsession is making that impossible. And finding penance in bloodshed. And pain.”

“In a sinful world.”

“’God’s lonely man,’” she quoted.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

For a moment Rey’s cheek tingled, as if anticipating he might reach up and cup it gently in his hand.

He cleared his throat and looked at his watch instead. “I’ll give everyone else five minutes.”

Rey blinked in surprise. “No one else is here?” That giddy Christmas morning feeling in her heart again.

“You’re the only one.” He smiled warmly. “Come on. Let’s go inside. I need another devil juice.” He raised his coffee sheepishly. “It’s my last remaining vice. Do you drink coffee?”

“Not really.” A last bit of business burned at her. “I feel bad for asking this, but . . .” She hesitated. She hated telling people about her financial state. Or asking for help she’d learned never really came. A little quiver of courage wriggled up in her. _You can trust him_ , she said. _He’s your --_

“Did you cut yourself?” he said, alarmed eyes zeroing in on the coin-width slash beneath her eye. In sudden impulsive action he wiped his middle fingertip gently on the tender skin. She froze, thrilling to the subtlest of touches. “You’re bleeding.”

“It’s nothing,” she said, shaking her head and wiping the spot herself. It was a reflexive lie and she hated herself for making it. But the comparative weight of what she needed to ask suddenly was positively buoyant compared to that grave truth. “I’m okay. I was just wondering if I could borrow money for a ticket. I don’t get my stipend until tomorrow and I’m –“ _Flat broke_ , she thought. “A little short,” she fudged.

“Don’t even worry,” he said. “I’ve got budget money to burn before the end of fiscal year. Everyone’s ticket was going to be on me anyway. And besides,” he said with a conspiratorial smile, “if no one else shows up, let’s blow it all at the concession stand. Bonnie and Clyde the popcorn bandits. Come on”. He grinned and offered her his elbow in a gesture of ironic chivalry. She suppressed a giggle and took it. He was too tall for her to do more but hook her hand over his forearm like a monkey, but it felt good.

Cinderella couldn’t have felt more grand walking into her ballroom than Rey felt walking inside the Bijou. It was an exquisite movie palace, built during the Golden Age of cinema and lovingly restored by a non-profit whose membership forms were on display all over the inside. They’d taken pains to preserve the celestial mural spangling the high-arched lobby and the gilded detailing scrolling around the walls. The people who’d come out for a movie tonight weren’t sodden slobs munching their way through the latest blockbuster. They were from all walks of life, but the snippets of conversation Rey caught as they walked through the lobby were the kind of conversations she’d yearned to have her entire life. _Who do you like better, Eisenstein or Vertov? Vinegar Syndrome’s doing a release with a 4K transfer and it’s going to be ballin’. I don’t even want to talk about Afrofuturism if you’re not bringing Crumbs into this conversation. You gotta come next week, we’re all going to Pather Panchali together. Did you hear they found a complete 35mm print of Greed in a vault in Sierra Leone? And it’s pristine nitrate. I almost cried when I heard the news._

Rey’s delight over her surroundings was quickly interrupted by the growling in her stomach. The buttery, toasty smell of fresh popcorn jolted her hunger back to awareness like a startled junkyard dog. The theater offered the usual mix of Raisinets and gummy worms, but also had an array of gourmet chocolates. Some were pure single source chocolate, the sleek wrappers displaying their cacao percentages as if proclaiming karats, but some were whimsical flavors like birthday cake or maple bacon. Rey stared, mouth watering. She didn’t treat herself to chocolate often, especially – oh my God, was that actually the price? To her they looked like ingots of gold.

A young woman with spattered eyeshadow and hair like a glowing ombre sunset smiled pleasantly at them from behind the concession counter. “What can I get you?”

“Medium popcorn, butter, no salt,” said Professor McTavish. “And a large coffee.” He turned to Rey. “What would you like?” he said.

Rey didn’t say anything. Want choking on her tongue.

He followed her eyeline.

He bent down as if to look at the chocolate with her. His mouth near her ear. Sotto voce. “Ask for it,” he whispered. An easy, amused command, the sound resonating not in her ear but in the center of her body. A tickle of arousal flared over her skin, like iron fillings enthralled by a magnet.

Rey swallowed hard. “One of the raspberries and cream bars,” she pointed. “And a chocolate mint crunch,” she blurted, in sudden shocked awareness of her hunger.

“And a hot dog,” added Professor McTavish, handing the cashier his card as she handed Rey the treats. The fat movie theater kielbasa was tucked into a fragrantly yeasty white bun, sleek with grease over its taut natural casing skin. Its garlicky, smoky, slightly singed sizzle smelled primally comforting. She took a bite and felt the casing snap under her teeth with a gush of salty, porky flavor. Constant hunger creates a tight stricture of fear that thrums low and ominous under everything you do. Now it was gone. She involuntarily closed her eyes in relief.

“Better?” he said softly, almost tenderly.

“Thank you,” she whispered as graciously as she could through a mouthful.

The theater was almost empty. It wasn’t a huge house, but of the hundred-some seats only a few dozen people had come for this show. “I thought there would be more,” said Rey as she squeezed into her seat. The theater was old enough that the wooden armrests polished by generations of elbows didn’t have cupholders – a fact that thrilled Rey immensely. She sat down, but he stayed standing.

“Sit tight,” said Professor McTavish. A slight tension was tightening his face. “I’m just going to go out and check that no other students are waiting outside.”

 _Oh_ , thought Rey. That’s right. There were other students invited. It had been a delicious six minutes as the sole focus of his regard. It wasn’t guaranteed to last.

“Oh, sure,” she said, nodding her head as nonchalantly as she could. “I’ll be here.” He hustled up the aisle.

She was alone in the hushed space of the barely full theater.

The old Rey would have accentuated the positive. The old Rey would have sighed, let go of hope, Pollyanna-ed the good parts. _He bought you a hot dog and two bars of chocolate, he dabbed at your cut, he paid for your ticket, he offered you his arm. That’s more than you ever dreamed of. Be grateful for that._

The old Rey would have said that, and swallowed her want.

But her want was too big to swallow now. Those small kindnesses had fed it and it had grown much too big to fit down her throat again. It wasn’t a demanding anger, focused at him. It was a crack in her sky that she now realized was only the small ceiling she’d lived beneath her whole life . . . imagine believing all that time that it was the sky,

_when the sky is vast and infinite_

The last time she ate away her suffering was that breakfast sandwich she devoured to comfort herself, that day he hadn’t shown up for class. She rummaged in the pouch of her hoodie and pulled out a chocolate bar. Raspberries and cream. It felt substantial and rich in her hand, more than any drugstore chocolate bar could. Even the wrapper was printed on heavy toothed paper. This bar knew its worth. This was the most deluxe food item she’d ever held in her hands, and she had it

_because she’d asked for it_

She disrobed the bar from its paper shell and tore off a corner of the rose gold foil. The good white chocolate snapped satisfyingly like a stick of chalk. She placed it on her tongue. It was like eating his command _ask for it_ , transubstantiating the thrill of his dominance into the late summer floral tang of raspberries and the unctuous melt of cocoa butter. She could swallow this. This would yield on her hot tongue and go down her throat easily. It would become a part of her. Thread some of him inside her.

_just how I want it_

She closed her eyes and rolled the dulcet chunk around her palate until it evaporated into a faint dairy memory. Its absence was its own kind of thrill. She folded the bar back into its wrapper reverently and closed her eyes. She could wait  
__  
wanting is its own kind of getting  
if you allow yourself to want it

“Hey.” That baritone, a little breathless. Rey snapped her eyes open.

“There’s no one else here,” he said. Something in his breathlessness was a little more than just from rushing back to her seat.

“There’s no one here from school?” said Rey. That question voiced something in the spaces.

“No one here from school,” he repeated. The look in his eyes saw what lay in the gaps.

Something subtle shifted in the air. Rey could feel it. The tumbler in some lock turning, the wind shifting, the air growing low and dark in that mute birdsong-less space before the hurricane begins.

“Do you want to change seats?” she squeaked, gesturing to their wide empty row stretching all the way to the wall.

As if by unspoken consensus they moved all the way down the row. Rey on the outside, Professor McTavish against the wall. He put their bags on the seat on the other side of her. Another wall.

The lights were dimming. She took one last look at him before they went down the deep dive of movie space, her mouth open with want and hope and tender fear. The animal look he bored into her was unlike any she’d ever seen.

“I read your paper,” was the last thing he spoke, and then all was dark.


	6. Gun Crazy

The movie started in a sudden klaxon of noir fanfare – credits, falling rain, the words “GUN CRAZY” zooming up close enough to taste. The _tick-tick-tick-tick_ pluck of pizzicato strings. The white noise of rain. A teenage boy, his gaze rigid on the six-shooter in the hardware store window. Licking his lips. He wants that gun. He’s willing to break glass to get it.

Rey sat stiffly, cocooned in the blackness and her own jitters. _What comes next?_ Isn’t a theater’s dark where first kisses happen? There’s a hundred movies about it: two novice lovers on a teenage date. The lights go down and both sit anxiously, hearts pounding, waiting for the other one to make the first move. The boy gives a theatrical stretch and drapes his arm over the back of her seat. Or she touches his hand reaching into the popcorn bucket. Rey bit her lip. Kisses happen so magically, so inevitably in the movies. But she was delirious with uncertainty about how to tip that domino in life, force that sacred intrusion, make the crossing of that rubicon as real as the six foot-and-change object of all of her hope filling the seat next to her.

Professor McTavish tilted his bag of popcorn towards her. “Have some,” he whispered calmly.

Her ears pricked up. She heard the test in his words. It wasn’t an offer. _Obey this small thing. Show me you’re willing. Because if you prove yourself . . . there will be more._

Rey reached out and took as large a handful as she could. She plucked it into her mouth one kernel at a time from the trembling nest of her hand. He watched her out of the corner of his dark eyes and said nothing. His eyes flicked back to the chiaroscuro screen. Uh oh, that bad boy’s got himself in trouble now. A parade of character witnesses plead on his behalf to the judge. _I’d never hurt anyone, your honor. I just gotta have a gun in my hand. It makes me feel good._

Rey chewed the last morsel and wiped her buttery hand absentmindedly against her jeans. He took her by the wrist and lifted her hand off the denim.

“No,” he said.

Her hand looked absurdly fragile in his astounding grip. He squeezed her wrist, just hard enough for her to feel the blood throb in her fingerprints. She felt the gem-sized bones inside her wrist click in protest as he took her hand to his mouth and kissed the meaty swath near her thumb. His grip twisted, compressed the tight point in that meat with his thumb and forefinger, made her fingers splay in shocked pressure as he rubbed it with powerful care. Then he let her go.

Rey swallowed hard. Some invisible yoke was knitting itself around her throat, placing a jeweled bit in her mouth. In its breathless chthonic bite she felt an exhilaration saints never know.

He tilted the bag towards her again. He didn’t even have to say it this time. Rey followed his wordless command. This time she ate the popcorn out of her fist and didn’t lick the sheen of butter from her fingers.

_Take two._

His eyes were still on the screen but she saw his lip curl in the slightest pleased flicker of what she knew now as the smallest quantum of that incandescent grin. _Good girl._

He leaned close to her and said, in a growl that she could feel in her pulse points,

“You like to touch yourself in the dark.”

Rey’s mouth went dry. She swallowed hard and shuddered out a nod.

That growl became an amused purr. “Show me.”

It dawned on her with an erotic shiver why he’d ordered popcorn, butter, no salt, and made her get it all over her hands. He wanted her fingers slick and easy upon all her softest parts that were now alert and eager under the thrill of his authority.

But how did he want her to do it? Like she did it in class? Why have greasy fingers if he just wanted her to rub the hard knot sewn at the crotch of her jeans? But he couldn’t possibly have meant reaching into her underwear. The other moviegoers scattered around them stared dumbly at the screen, unaware of what was happening in the empty row she and he shared. Unaware for now. That could change.

Rey looked up at him. His eyes had that same encouraging twinkle she’d seen in class. Only his slightly flared nostrils and the increased rise and fall of his chest laid bare his hunger. She didn’t take her eyes away from his as she reached down to the radiating locus of pleasure practically burning through her jeans and stroked her fingertip on the denim over her clit, just like how she had that time in class he’d caught her. That day she had to content herself with only the silhouette of his back as inspiration. Now her heart rate tripled instantly at the pleasure of taking him all in – that plush mouth, that deliciously irregular face, those fathomless coffee-black eyes boring into her through his glasses – while stroking herself. Slow, languorous shudders of gratification started percolating in her at a faster pace that ever before.

He exhaled deeply – was there a hint of exasperation in it? – and stretched his arm over the back of Rey’s seat. Just like in the movies. But no matinee Romeo ever rested the flat of his palm over the nape of her neck like this, massaged the stiff tendons there, just for one comfortable moment, and then constricted his wide-spanning grip over the entire back of her neck. Like a tiger’s jaws. Holding down his mate.

He slid down in his seat and casually leaned into her ear again.

“You know what I asked.”

The meaning was clear: _you won’t get away with cowardice again_. She balked. _He can’t really be making me do this_ , she thought. But that twinge of weak modesty died quickly in the crescendo of what she really wanted.

Rey lifted her hand. She could feel his just-past-comfortable grip pulsing at the back of her neck as she got the top of her jeans undone. She pulled down her zipper. “Lower,” he whispered, stroking her neck, fingers playing and twisting at the downy baby hairs at the very edge of her hairline. Eyes never leaving the screen. That gun-mad kid was a man now. He was prowling the midway with his chums, their leers wide at the hoochie-coochie dancers and snake charmers and _Ladies and gentlemen! the famous, the dangerous, the beautiful, the darling of London England -- Miss Annie Laurie Starr!_ And a dangerous blonde bursts into the frame gunshots-first, _blam blam blam_ , a succubus summoned from Cupid’s underworld in a cloud of gunsmoke. Aphrodite on the shell casing. Rapturous applause.

The blonde lowered her gun and popped off a playful _bang!_ in the audience’s face at the same moment Rey shoved her jeans down to the tops of her thighs and spread them as much as the waistband let her. Her pink underwear was the prettiest she owned but its age made it easy to dive her fingers past its slack elastic. Her index finger found her grateful clit quickly. That Technicolor flesh-on-flesh feeling made her suck in air through her teeth at the sweet wrongness of it. The dark of the theater, his hand on her neck, the slow even panting of his animal-like breath audible to her even over the midway gunfire on the screen. Every twitch of her knuckle paid dividends unlike anything she’d ever done to herself before. He squeezed the tight muscles at the back of her neck in time to each subtle and delicious rotation she lashed around her supercharged flesh. When he took his hand away from her neck she didn’t stop. She had a sudden sense memory of a milestone that never happened for her: a dad teaching a daughter to ride a two-wheeler. Pushing from behind, exhorting _pedal, pedal, pedal, that’s it,_ letting go without her realizing, propelling herself forward on her own power and courage, just like he knew she could.

She didn’t stop stroking herself as he reached leisurely into the popcorn bag. There was that pile of their bags and coats in the next seat shielding her. Maybe someone in the theater could see her hand stirring inside her pink panties. With wanton revelation she realized she didn’t care. Maybe whether she was doing something they might see wasn’t up to her. Maybe the egg white blot she might be leaving on the velvet seat below her drooling cunt was an exquisite souvenir. Miss Annie Laurie Starr the carnival sharpshooter was now taking challenges from her midway audience. _Shoot out the matches on this crown of fire I wear and win the prize._ She was a black widow blonde fifty feet high on a silver screen and in this brazen moment she was Rey’s tigress mirror. In that surge of liberation she leaned over to him and made a wish on a coin in the fountain of her want

_I want to be a slut_

but it left her tongue, into his ear, “I want to be your slut.”

He shifted in his seat and nonchalantly rubbed his buttery palms together before reaching into her lap. The whisper he placed in the ticklish nook behind her ear sealed it:

“You decided that two classes ago.”

His fingers nudged the elastic open.

When his finger landed on her clit her eyes rolled up in sanpaku delirium. Nothing in her entire life had ever felt this good. Every other part of her clenched up in sudden orgasmic reflex, underused muscles now almost painfully ready to grip and milk something tight. Her shaking hands clawed the armrests as he pinched and rolled and slid, his sharp appraising gaze never leaving her. His man-sized fingers were blunt objects to her own familiar pinprick touch. They touched wide swaths of real estate in her cunt but their aim was true. He watched her intently, noticing every subtle movement and creasing of her eyebrows and hard squeezing of her eyes. Drawing his mental map of what felt good where. Cartographer of her untouched euphoria. He slid his thumb down and found the dot of space under the arch of her clit, an anatomical morsel he could oh so softly pinch and rock. When he did that a single glittering strand of saliva fell in a quick gossamer snap from her lower lip and she didn’t even notice.

“Hold onto my arm,” he whispered and she seized it, wrapping her arms tightly around the tree trunk of his biceps and clinging to it like a shipwreck rescue. She couldn’t see the screen from behind eyes closed in ecstasy but she heard it. Gunslingers of the noir savannah on the stick-up prowl. Bonnie and Clyde the popcorn bandits. In their tense pre-heist banter she heard the same unholy arousal that coursed through her own body. It felt good to have a secret with a partner in crime. It felt good to have someone who loves movies as much as you did slide the first two knuckles of his finger up and down the smooth swollen gully between your labia and nudge your clit with the blunt pressure of the third, all under the moonlight of a silver screen. He hit some undiscovered sweet spot with such certainty that in sudden deranged reflex she threaded one arm under his and touched the rigid arch pulsing against his fly. Stroking its zipper-bound curve felt heart-poundingly good under the heat of her palm. It made something inevitable and delicious boil over inside her with unprecedented momentum. She bit into his arm to stifle the squeaking gasp spiraling out of her throat just in time before everything inside her exploded in a bloodrush of pleasure. In her haze she heard him suck in his breath too

_the weightless space of the orgasmic_

When the smoke cleared soft cathartic tears unconsciously welled up in her eyes. _He saw me. He fed me. He gave me everything I wanted._ Tears of gratitude set free by bone-shaking ecstasy glittered her vision.

He didn't say anything about her tears. He stroked her back in long caring, languorous drags and unzipped his fly. Her hands followed to touch that sordidly engorged cock that filled her grip, stout enough that her fingers and thumb couldn't form a closed loop around it. He wrapped his big warm hand in hers and sleeved her grip up and down for a dozen slow strokes before letting her go. She thought it would be like touching a waxed banister pole. The velvety give and stretch of its skin over the swollen core was a pleasant surprise. His strokes against her back got carelessly firmer until her was gripping her shoulder in a great clawing squeeze digging into her collarbone. She could feel his pulse. A saltwater dot of wet suddenly slickened her fingers –

He pushed her head towards him. Urgency in his hiss.

“Stop now or put your mouth on me.”

Those words put on the brakes inside her. She wanted very badly to please him. But a nauseous, forgotten something flickered up inside her . . . Her eyes darted as she searched for the answer. Her hand kept stroking up and down in nervous ambivalence while she racked her brain for what she should choose –

He grabbed her hand. “I mean it,” he said, voice ragged with effort.

She looked up at him. He must have seen the confusion and pleading in her gaze. His own face softened.

“It’s all right. You’re not ready,” he said.

He unpeeled her hand from his cock and stuffed himself hard back under his fly.

Rey was horrified. Had she done him wrong? But her worries evaporated when he shuddered out a deep get-ahold-of-yourself breath and pulled her close to plant a butterfly-light kiss on her forehead. Its blink of sensation sent a tingle through her entire body.

For the rest of the movie she nuzzled into his chest, sighing deeply. One of his arms enfolded her. With the other he grazed his knuckles gently back and forth against the now humid cotton crotch of her underwear. Not enough to come again. Just enough to send a delectable hum through her contentment. The lovers onscreen met no good end at the movie's conclusion. She didn’t notice.

THE END. Lights up. The other moviegoers gathered their coats and shuffled up the aisle. Rey quickly wriggled back into her pants, red-faced, and scanned the faces of the other departing patrons nervously to see if she’d been caught. Professor McTavish was unconcerned. He took a last handful of popcorn and licked what she knew was not butter from his fingers.

“Goodnight!” chirruped the ushers holding brooms in the lobby. The woman with the ombre sunset hair was scouring out the popcorn popper with a pungent vinegar spray. Last show of the evening. Rey didn’t want to leave, didn’t want her coach to turn back into a pumpkin, have her mice footmen scurry away. With bittersweet joy she bid farewell to 90 minutes where her every wish came true. The chocolate bars were still tucked into her hoodie pocket. They felt like a handful of stolen fairy dust, meant to sustain her in her fall towards the cruel real world.

Professor McTavish didn’t say anything to her. They had assumed their public faces now: teacher and student, older and younger, nothing between them but a respectable two feet of personal space. The delight of their secret garlanded her like diamonds. _There are consequences for what we’ve done_ , Rey realized. They both knew the rules. Rey wondered what he thought of those rules. She already knew they were insufficient to address the magic of the current situation.

They stood under the marquee outside. The rows of egg-shaped electric lights blinking across its undercarriage were the stars of their sky.

“You taking the bus home?” he asked.

There was the slightest upturn of worry in that question mark. Maybe worry about her safety.

Maybe more than that.

For the first time ever in her life Rey was grateful for her poverty.

“I don’t have enough for bus fare,” she said truthfully.

The flicker of a smile polished his face for a moment. But his dark eyes gave nothing away.

“Then come home with me.”


	7. Wet Transfer

Professor McTavish behind the wheel, Rey sitting shotgun. The unabashed luxury of riding in a car floored her. It had been so long since she’d been chauffeured somewhere. His car was a beat up Prius but its modest consumer comforts – heat, soft seat, radio -- stood in stark contrast to the pathetically utilitarian experience she was accustomed to. She wound her hands around each other in her hoodie pocket and tried to not make the chocolate bars melt from the heat of her skin. PJ Harvey’s aluminum-sharp voice snarling through the speakers _. I want to bathe in milk. Eat grapes. Robert DeNiro sit on my face._

He lived in Tico Flats. That surprised her. She thought everyone urbane and savvy ended up in Dameron or Jannahton, with their bookstores and food co-ops and pop-up music festivals. Why was he living in this spanking new suburban development, where the houses tried too hard and the road was a bland asphalt runway? He almost looked embarrassed to raise the beige oblong transponder that buzzed him into the gated section. The gabled McMansion they pulled in front of had all the soul of a block of styrofoam. For a sharp fearful moment Rey felt the wince she always felt arriving at an alien house. She’d been promised too many times that this new one was “home”.

He unlocked the front door and held it open for her.

“Come on in.”

She stepped over the threshold cautiously.

The place was huge, and unnervingly empty. It had the wall-to-wall carpets and recessed lights and cream-colored kitchen island of a respectably tasteful home. But its lack of furniture was surreal. Rooms that were supposed to be cozy were just vast. The kitchen bread box and fruit bowl were empty. It felt like a home for some bloodless race of people who never ate or needed to rest. A few moving boxes sat abandoned in a dark corner. She couldn’t tell if that meant he was moving in or moving out. Maybe somehow both at once.

“Want something to drink?” he asked. He opened the fridge and she could see a few perishables backlit from a tremendous glow of white. He grabbed a gallon of orange juice. “I have this and some cans of seltzer downstairs.”

This wasn’t a test. He was genuinely offering her a drink this time. Rey nodded. He placed a cool tumbler of juice into her hands. She drank the syrupy tart nectar in one gulp. Thirsty. When she handed the tumbler back to him she noticed how carefully he’d watched her, making sure she’d gotten what she needed. Wordless, watchful tenderness in his stare. That flower of gratitude unfurled in her heart again.

She kneaded the balls of her feet on the floor in a nervous prance. That stare made it easy for her to reach her hands around his waist and press her body against him, feel the hum of his vitality against her belly and breasts and cheek. His arms wrapped around her in return, hands cupping the back of her skull. She tilted her face up towards his, her eyes bright and expectant and humble. He reached up and took off his glasses and folded them on the counter with a _klik_. Some people you see without their glasses for the first time look beady-eyed and nude. He didn’t. If anything his warm hazel eyes looked like they’d been set free from behind the dark frames.

He didn’t waste time bending down to kiss her.

 _This is it_ , she thought, virgin excitement percolating up in scintillating asterisks inside her as his mouth neared hers. _This is a kiss_. Putting your face in someone else’s atmosphere, into where their blue sky is. His mouth was incredibly soft and muscled over hers and she parted her mouth instinctually to let his tongue in. Would it be strange, grotesque, comedic to touch him tongue to tongue? Then the divinity of how the muscle of his tongue felt sliding against the slick texture of hers answered that question in a way that made sensual delight effervesce up her body. Kissing him was like tasting his smile. Some synesthetic erotic alchemy transformed its voluptuary span and wolfish incisors into a flavor, the coherent essence of him. She could taste coffee and popcorn and with a little embarrassed shiver realized he could taste orange juice.

His hands scooped under her armpits. He hoisted her onto the kitchen island so quickly it made Rey give a little squeal. His mouth didn’t leave hers as his fingers undid the zipper of her hoodie, shucking her out of its flannel chrysalis. His dense hipbones filled the space between her thighs. His hands were so big she could feel them spanning from her side to her back, thumb high on her ribs, fingertips at the ticklish can’t-touch-it spot between her shoulderblades. Like the spot at the back of a cat’s neck, the spot it’s so grateful you’ll scratch for it. She undulated unconsciously against his palms.

She expected him to be frighteningly brave in his own territory. To do things to her that couldn’t be done anywhere else. But instead he pulled his lips away from hers with a nearly inaudible _mpluk_ that echoed in the tomb-quiet house. He stroked the tendrils away from her face and looked into her eyes with such benevolence that Rey couldn’t help but feel her heart soar.

“Want to come see my space?” he whispered.

She nodded. He put his hands under her armpits again and this time hoisted her into his arms. She knew she was not a little girl anymore but it was a gleeful surprise how effortlessly he could carry her. She rode out of the kitchen pressed to his torso, trying to lock her ankles together at the small of his back. Gripping his waist as hard as she could with her inner thighs gave a sensation like trying to span the ribs of a bareback horse. It didn’t matter. His two hands cupped her butt with care and his arms bore her weight well. _I won’t fall_ , she thought with delicious surety.

He carried her past the kitchen, down the hallway, to a darkened room. He let go with one hand to flick its light on. _ZZnip_. The room blushed a pinky amethyst as a neon sign inside it sparked to life. It spelled out one word in ebullient ‘80s cursive: _New Releases._

Rey had seen his office at school. She thought that nook was the ultimate expression of his cinephilia. This shrine of a study shamed it by comparison. The just-cozy-enough space was ringed with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and every bookshelf groaned with an eclectic mix of devotional artifacts: hundreds of VHS tapes in well-loved boxes, carelessly piled DVDs and Blu-Rays, a hand-crank Bolex camera and stacks of 16mm reels, more books about movies than Rey could ever imagine. Posters for _Forbidden Zone_ and _This Gun For Hire_ and _Walkabout_ hung behind a well-loved black couch. A flat screen TV presided over a rogue’s gallery of video decks. Something golden glinted behind a pile of tchotchkes on the bookshelf. A winged woman holding a skeletal globe --

“Is that a real Emmy?” Rey slid down his front and walked over to where the gold-toned statuette slunk shyly behind a pile of screenplays, as if embarrassed by her prestige.

“It’s just a regional Emmy,” he said. He unearthed it from its hiding place. Rey could read its engraved nameplate. _William McTavish. Outstanding Program Achievement, KOCE Public Broadcasting, 2003._ “See, the base is rectangular. National Emmys have a round base. Local television gets this kind.”

“It’s still an Emmy,” said Rey, impressed, but he just shrugged and returned it to its hermit nook. The award looked relieved to be returned to obscurity.

“That’s what I’m really proud of,” he said instead, pointing to the _New Releases_ neon sign. “That’s from Tapeworm Video. It used to be this great video store. That was my first job in LA. I made sure to liberate that sign before I left. Before the wrecking ball came.”

 _Los Angeles._ He had a whole life, before she came along. The weight of his history felt so important weighed against her ingénue nothingness.

She looked back at him. He usually projected so much power and certainty. But here, in this space, surrounded by the things that mattered deeply to him, under the blush of the _New Releases_ sign . . . She saw for the first time a tremendous vulnerability in him. She got the feeling that not many people got invited to this room. Or knew how to appreciate it.

“I appreciate it,” she murmured, staring up at the sign. Starstruck by the neon promise of _New_.

He came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. His mass felt so good against her and she swooned, turning, his mouth coming down over hers again. “Come sit on my lap,” he whispered. “It’s easier to kiss you that way.”

She straddled his lap. He was right: finally their faces were level. Within seconds the heat between them escalated to how it had been in the theater. She ground her crotch against his as he gripped her butt and slid restless hands under her shirt. His fingers fumbled at the elastic band of her sports bra before sliding under. She shuddered and whimpered as his hands cupped and kneaded her breasts. Her nipples reveled in the way he softly twisted and pinched them. As she kissed him with increasing fervor she couldn’t help but purr her moans into his mouth.

“Good girl,” he murmured. The words sent a glow of arousal right to her clit.

He shoved the bottom elastic of her bra up over her breasts and peeled up the hem of her shirt. The enormity of the moment made the breath catch in her throat. A man was looking at her naked breasts. Not just looking: palming them, weighing them eagerly in his hands, dragging the flat of his tongue across the pebbly corona of her nipple. _My shirt is pulled up_ , she thought with excitement. _He sees me._ _Just like a slut._ She was exposed in the way that lovers are exposed to each other. She pushed the bra up higher and looked down to watch him tweak one nipple and suck on the other, run that exquisite mouth over and over its target, in ways that made her pulse thrum in her softest parts in time with her pounding heart. Without meaning to she started to grind it against the hardening ridge under his fly. The quick dividend of the smallest motion made her eyes close and back arch in sudden erotic overwhelm.

“Take your jeans off.” He planted the order into her sternum with a half dozen kisses. She leapt at the chance to follow an order. She scrambled out of the tangle of her jeans and shoes as quickly and gracefully as she could. He helped. When only her underwear remained he wasted no time prowling his fingers under the elastic like he had with her bra. It felt so good to have her butt gripped skin to skin in his big hands while still wearing her panties. It was the sensation of being naked and clothed at the same time. She closed her eyes and felt her mouth opening in a desperate pout she’d never worn on her face before. It only made him suck in his breath and knead her buttocks with even firmer desperation.

“You really are orgasmic, aren’t you?” he said, breathy and bemused. She couldn’t gather herself to do more than nod shakily and keep rocking against the increasingly stiff ridge of his zipper. Maybe she was exceptionally orgasmic. She didn’t know. All she knew was that she liked what she did to her body alone, and now she liked what he did to it even more. Her slightly humiliating inability to contain her pleasure in a polite little bundle seemed to absolutely delight him.

“Do you want me to touch you, too?” she gasped rashly. As soon as she said it a panic set in. _What do I do?_ It was delectable to stroke his velvety cock in the theater after he’d shattered her with an orgasm. But her head was relatively clear now. And they weren’t in a theater any longer. Anything could happen here. If he wanted to cum she would somehow be responsible for it and it just felt all of a sudden like she’d agreed to a terrible idea, like deciding on a whim to go over Niagara just because of a sudden lust for a steep wet drop --

“Yes,” he hissed. He pounded a bruising kiss in the soft underside of her jaw and put her hand on his zipper. Nausea threaded through her. _Make a hasty retreat_ , she thought.

“Ok,” she said, hands shaking. “But I have to pee first.” She started to dismount where she’d straddled him.

He grabbed her hand.

“Are you nervous?” he asked. Genuine concern in his voice.

She’d lied about the bloody mark under her eye. She didn’t want to lie to him again.

“Yes,” she confessed. “But I really do have to pee.” A memory she didn’t like to talk about started grinding through the projector of her shame. He saw the darting of her eyes and the quiver in her lip and read her correctly.

He pulled her close and held her small shuddering body tightly.

“Tell me,” he purred into her ear. It was an order. But a kind one.

She buried her face in his neck. It was easier to say it when she didn’t have to look at him.

“This one time . . .” she began, voice shaking, “I was in a foster home. I must have been four or five. And I don’t remember why, but I wet my pants. And the foster father in charge of me told me as punishment I had to wear a diaper. And I had to wear a dress so everyone could see I was wearing a diaper.” The secret hurt going down and it hurt regurgitating it back up. “I even remember the dress. It was red velvet with a white collar. I loved that dress.” She buried her face in his collarbone. She was almost crying now. “I don’t remember anything about that man,” she said. “I don’t remember his name or his face or the sound of his voice or how long he had me. But I remember that dress. And I remember holding his hand as he walked me down the street. Ruining dresses for me forever.”

Now she really was crying, deep racking sobs that made her curl into herself like a pillbug. His arms enfolded her and his palms stroked powerful comforting streaks down her back. He let her soak hot tears into the collar of his shirt until her convulsive grief slowed to a meek sporadic sob.

He took a firm hank of her hair in his fist and tugged gently, just enough to raise her tear-streaked face up to face his. She was so humiliated to be seen this way: weak, runny-nosed, puffy-eyed, as raw as raw can be – but the pull of her hair in his fist was soporifically comforting.

“I won’t do that to you,” he promised.

She nodded and sniffled and wiped the snail streaks of her runny nose on her hand. A losing attempt at cleaning up. He grabbed a discarded T-shirt from the couch and dabbed her face with it instead.

“You really needed a daddy,” he said with quiet empathy.

She nodded mutely. It was a truth that was so true it burned to look at it. She couldn’t do more than collapse feebly onto his chest again, tuck her arms under her like how a cat bundles itself into a little loaf. He kept stroking her back, first over her shirt and then under it. Under it felt better.

“Do you still need to pee?” he whispered into her ear.

She did smile a little at the tension-breaking silliness of the question. “Yes,” she confessed.

“Then do it.” His tone was serious. “Wet Daddy’s lap. You’re a good little girl. Nothing is going to happen. You’re learning, you make mistakes. All little girls do. I’ll just clean you up and we’ll think nothing of it.”

She froze. _He can’t actually be saying this_ , she thought.

“We’re on your couch.”

“So what,” he murmured. His hands played through her hair with a little more vigor than before. “This couch has seen worse.”

 _Daddy._ That was the word that unlocked her wish, the first time she was overcome by her crush for him, the first day of class she’d raced home and dove her fingers into the wet heart of herself and made herself come imagining him saying _call me Daddy_. She’d never spoken that wish aloud to anyone. Here, under the powderpuff fuschia glow of a neon sign, barely dressed in more than her ragged pink panties, pressed up against the body she’d been yearning to be pressed against for so long that the reality of it still felt like a fever dream . . . is this where a wish comes true?

“Daddy,” she whispered in the tiniest voice.

He didn’t say anything. The ridge under his zipper twitched. She felt it very cleanly under the threadbare crotch of her panties. She scooted herself up to splay herself right over the heart of his lap.

She swallowed hard. This was a difficult thing to do. It meant overcoming years of toilet training, the very sensible discipline to restrain from wetting your pants. What’s worse, the thought of doing it did give her an erotic shiver. It only made everything in her pussy clench up more. _I don’t know if I can do this_ , she worried. She nibbled her lower lip and tried to concentrate on relaxing the muscles that held the urine inside her.

He’d stopped stroking her back and just held his palm against it. No extraneous sensations to distract her concentration. She ducked her face into his collarbone again. She couldn’t do this with him watching. The pounding in her heart made her almost fear passing out. There were new tickling sensations in her pussy, not just focused in her clit like how she was used to arousal. Subtle muscles were relaxing. There was pleasure in their unclenching, and in the equally subtle pressure gathering in her lower abdomen, like a storm cloud.

She willed herself still.

_The only thing to do is wait._

She pushed and strained a little. The hardest thing might be overcoming the sensual cue of the feel of cloth against her skin. But soon she did feel a liquid tickle, and its herald felt so good it emboldened her to push again, and more subtle muscles relaxed, her heart pounding, a tickling little crest between the most sensitive petals of her labia, that last little moment before the undeniable dribble of something forbidden dabbed her panties –

And just before the floodgates open she flashed back to the buttered popcorn and thought _is this why he gave me something to drink?_

“You can do it,” he whispered –

and in that moment she felt the bloom of a hot stain in the crotch of her underwear. The teaspoon of urine emboldened her. It felt good. She pushed again. _I’m wetting my panties_ , she thought, _I’m such a naughty girl._ And that forbidden thought opened the floodgates. The blossoming puddle soaking her panties felt like a delicious hot compress against her engorged pussy. He gasped and started rubbing her back again, rubbing his crotch against hers, whispering “More” as he reached to massage her butt again. His hands on her butt weren’t a distraction any more. Every spurt coming out of her was just another pleasure to add to what he was doing to her. She looked down and saw where his pants were staining under her flow.

That deranged lust she’d felt in the theater came over her again. She reached down and unzipped his fly and extricated his cock from its prison. It sprung to attention and she quickly pressed her own crotch against it, ground her clit on the hard edge of it, anointed it with urine, watched the puddle on his jeans grow. “Let it all out,” he growled, grinding against her. His cock was tight-skinned and a very firm surface to rub against. “Does it feel good?”

“Yes, Daddy,” she said in a crushed whisper.

“You’re a good girl. My little piss princess.” _Princess_ , she beamed. _No one has ever called me princess before._

“Time to make Daddy come,” he said, fisting a handful of her hair.

He lifted her off of him in one fierce move and threw her down on the couch. He twisted the crotch of her panties so he could shove his mouth under them. “Keep pissing,” he commanded as he ran his tongue over her shocked clit. That was impossible. She was all tapped out and even if she had more inside her, the nerve action of what he was doing to her made opening up those muscles impossible. But she tried her best, even if there was nothing left to give.

He stripped out of his shirt in one smooth motion and her eyes went wide at the span of his chest and the power in his arms. She imagined how she must appear to him: shirt and bra pushed up over her breasts, soaked panties pulled to the side in a way that mocked all modesty. The realization of her disheveled nudity only turned her on more. _I am on display for you_ , she thought, and with that thought she realized she wanted to be on display for him all the time.

“Take off your shirt and bra,” he growled, as if he had read her mind. She wriggled out of them as he clawed at the feeble elastic of her panties. It snapped and rended in his fingers until just shreds clung to her hips and her soaked pussy was completely exposed. The loss of her one good pair of underwear didn’t bother her in the least. She was awash with the thrill of her debasement. All her virginal terror was narcoticized in the thrill of submission. It was impossible to read what he had planned for her. He just kneeled above her on the couch, cock in hand, long dark hair sharp in sweaty needles at the edge of his face slack with lust, like hers was moments ago, when she was willing herself to piss on him. He just stared at her, that demonic something coursing over his expression, as if he was gathering himself –

 _Wait, he’s not going to_ –

The clear stream gushed out of the slit of his cock with ejaculatory force. Its hot liquid found the target of her clit quickly and she seized up and gasped at how good the warm flow felt on her nerve endings. The humiliation of it, the degredation, the undeniable warm wet sensory pleasure, the sight of her secret crush turned movie buddy turned dominant darling Daddy kneeling over her and dousing her in what came out of his exquisite cock –

“Cum for me,” he said, rubbing the tip of his cock over her now soaked pussy. He licked his fingers and rolled her clit between his thumb and forefinger, just like how he had in the theater. The same chain reaction started building in her again. Her eyes rolled in the back of her head. “You cum so pretty, baby.” His eyes had dark fire in them and his snarl made his canine teeth sing. “And I know you can do it. You are such a good little slut.” He lay his weight on top of her, hissing in her ear as his fingers worked her clit furiously. “You cum so good for Daddy. I love that about you. You sweet little virgin and you fucking love to cum.”

“I do love to cum, Daddy,” she wailed. Saying _Daddy_ again and again just made its dark incantation truer and truer. She forced herself to open her eyes and look deeply into his, press her hand against his cheek, feel the pinpricks of sweat and the grinding muscle of his jaw as he locked eyes with her and kept tweaking and strumming that point she so dearly loved stroked. It was now her turn to thread her fingers through his hair and while she would never dream of fisting it like he did to her she just wanted to touch those salt and pepper locks, to run it through her fingers, to feel something silken and sensual as the kundalini swirl coiling through her pussy reached its breaking point –

\--- and she came again, so shudderingly, looking into his eyes, and the catharsis was so violent she started crying all over again but this time tears of ecstatic relief . . . and the joy of looking into his eyes as the most secret part of her fluttered unafraid under his fingers.

Some sudden reality broke into his gaze. “What birth control are you on?” he said.

She blinked in surprise. “None.” It wasn’t anything she’d ever had to worry about before. It wasn’t something she thought she’d have to worry about tonight.

 _This is the second time tonight he hasn’t come,_ she thought. _Is he going to make me -- ?_

He narrowed his eyes in quick calculation. Something in the animal ferocity in his gaze softened and he was Professor McTavish again.

“Come on,” he said, scooping her up off the couch. “Upsy-daisy. Let’s get you cleaned up. I have an idea.”


	8. Technicolor

Ten minutes later Rey was standing in his shower, a plush deluge of warm water rushing over her naked body. His bathroom had a good showerhead, not like the institutional ones at her dorm with their spindly spider-leg spray of lukewarm water. She could stick her whole head under the spray and let the hundreds of tiny forceful fingers of water penetrate the cushion of her hair and thrum against her scalp. She remembered a conundrum someone in another class had posed her: _Which would you rather give up for the rest of your life, sex or hot water? Think about it: no coffee, no soup, no hot showers._ She saw now it wasn’t really a brainteaser. It was more like a Zen koan, as purposely unanswerable as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” She decided not to think about it and instead ran her fingers through her hair, sighing deeply.

“Let me do that,” he said from behind her. Or really, from above her, since when she leaned her head back it touched his naked chest right below his sternum. She leaned there for one languorous, contented moment as he stroked her throat like how you persuade a cat to swallow a pill. He had good shampoo, too. Her threshold for “good” meant “not from the dollar store”, but she was still grateful for how creamy it felt on her scalp, how coconutty and fragrant it smelled, how easily it lubricated his hands as he swept them through her hair.

“I’m sorry my hair’s such a nothing,” she said shyly. It was a nothing. Stick straight, lank, a color that couldn’t make up its mind and so resigned itself to being the world’s dullest dishwater blonde. She’d always cut it herself and its hemline was choppy and ragged.

“It’s not a nothing,” he said. His baritone reverberated in the small tiled space. She could feel the vibration in his throat conduct through her bones when she leaned her head back against his chest. “Why do you keep it short?” he asked as he scrubbed a little deeper.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just to make it easy, I guess.”

“Did you ever have it long?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Maybe when I was living somewhere where they forgot to cut it.” She remembered the shame of how her hair would tangle to ragged tumbleweed at the ends after leaving a placement with that kind of cosmetic neglect. How sometimes the next “parent” would shear it short and some would just scold her for not brushing it enough. Having long hair like that just advertised to the world no one cared enough about her to plait it in careful braids or buy her the small treat of a plastic barrette. Better just to chop it off at the shoulders and sidestep the whole thing.

He _tsked_ in disapproval. “Shame on them.” He gently pushed her head under the spray. She screwed up her face tight as he rinsed out the pearly shampoo. He didn’t stop combing her now smoothed hair with his big fingers even after all the shampoo had rinsed out. “Don’t cut it,” he said gently. “Grow it out. I want to see it long. I want to wash it again,” he added, and kissed her at the very top of her head. The tingle washed down her like the last of the suds.

“Okay,” she said, very pleased.

She sighed and leaned back against him. She could feel her butt pressed against the top third of his thighs. The nudge of his erection tucked itself in the curve right above the small of her back. No matter how far back she leaned on him, the wall of him could support her inconsequential weight.

He squeezed the vise of his arms around her and leaned his face into her neck.

“Tell me what you’re afraid of.”

She shook her head. “This is just hard for me.” She felt bad enough about burdening him with her first secret earlier this evening. She was still raw from that revelation. She’d learned in life that, no matter how much someone swears they’re your confidant, you can wear out your welcome pretty quickly if you’re too loose with the complaints.

“I know I’m a very big person,” he mumbled into her neck. _That’s for sure_ , she thought, but didn’t say anything. “I live with people’s preconceptions about that,” he continued. “You’re not the first woman to be afraid of me. Not for any good reason. Just because I came around a corner too close, too late at night. Or I was accidentally too quiet standing behind them in the supermarket aisle.”

“What do they do?”

“They jump. They reach for their purse before they can stop themselves. Or, they measure me with their eyes. Like I’m a Clydesdale. I try to ignore it.” He lifted his hands and smoothed her hair back in long strokes. “I’ve seen guys get a swelled head from a lifetime of being the biggest dude with the deepest voice in every room they’ve ever been in. I’m not going to fall into _that_ sinkhole.” He sighed. “You get the body you get and you have to live in it.” He kissed the soft spot under her ear, the same spot into which he’d ratified her sluthood. “But you have a very nice one.”

She blushed and ducked her head down but still grinned ear to ear. No one had ever told her that before. “What do you like about it?”

“A lot of things. This,” he said, tracing the swoop of her waist to her hips with the light touch of one finger. “And this.” He dragged that finger in the crease where her butt met the top of her thighs, traced the groove up the crack of her ass in one long shivery trip up her spine. His hands swept around her again and dragged teasingly against her nipples. “There’s plenty to like.”

The boon of self-confidence gave the littlest bit of courage she needed to push forward a question that had been nagging her.

“I don’t know how to ask this,” she started, “but . . .” She twisted herself around in the narrow space to face him and put her trembling hand around his cock. It stiffened and jumped a little in her hand. She blushed.

“ . . . Is this big? For a guy?”

“Yeah.” He gave her a _you-caught-me_ roll of the eyes. “And that’s got its own bunch of, uh . . .” He searched for the precise word. “. . . conceptions,” he finally settled on. “It’s like how everyone swears up and down how they want a dog that’s intelligent. Then they get a Border Collie but don’t treat it any differently than an ordinary dog. Then it gets bored and tears their place apart.”

 _Tears their place apart._ “Yikes,” Rey said. She let go where she was gripping him.

“Bad choice of words. It’s just an expression,” he assured her. He took her head in his hands and looked intently into her eyes. “Is that why you’re afraid?”

She thought about it. “A little,” she said, thinking out loud. “Maybe. Not really.”

“You can tell me.”

The sense memory of it suddenly overwhelmed her. She tried to hold back the nausea of her terror in that moment in the house with The Bad Kid. The Kid whose crinkly red hair made her hate crinkly red hair, whose insatiable taste for blue raspberry flavor made her hate the look of anyone’s tongue stained candy blue. The Kid whom everyone believed, instead of her.

“When I was in this one place . . .” she began, shakily, and then couldn’t continue.

He reached behind her and turned off the water. The white noise of the shower spray disappeared and the only sounds left were the _plink_ of straggler drips and her tight breathing. Her wet body shivered in the sudden relative cold and he noticed. He reached over and grabbed the softest and fluffiest white towel and swaddled it over her shoulders.

“Skip that part,” he intoned. His eyes bored into her with great concern. “Tell me the question.”

There _was_ a question in there. He’d somehow sussed it out. She didn’t want this whole night to be a rehashing of every sexual trauma but it sure seemed to be turning out that way. Thank god that, as ugly as this secret was, it was the last one.

She looked up at him through eyelashes spiky with water.

“If someone cums on you,” she said in a small crushed whisper, “and you’re not paying attention, and you’re just trying to do homework, and he comes up behind you, and you don’t even know he’s doing it until he’s right at the back of your neck . . .” A skin-crawling metallic dread flooded her gut. She looked up at him with pleading eyes and tried to choke out the end of the sentence:

“ . . . are you still a virgin?”

He didn’t answer. Vein pulsing in his jaw. It made her nervous. _Is he angry with me? Have I somehow deceived him about who I am, or what I’ve done?_ The burning fear of having wronged him agitated the shameful memory. The Kid’s sudden cruel prank of what she thought was just him hocking a loogie on the back of her neck. Wheeling around to see his fly open, the queasy reality of it, rushing to the bathroom past his guffaw, trying to put her whole head in the sink to wash it off and only getting the chlorinated water backwards up her nose, burning, choking. Locking herself in the bathroom for the rest of the evening, until the parents came home. Getting punished for being obstinate. Exiled back into the system a day later.

The memory was so bold and catastrophic it blotted out the shower and the towel and the cold water rivulets running down her legs. The world only rushed back in when he pressed his hand to her wet face. She blinked, as stunned as a time traveler returned to the here and now.

He pressed his forehead to hers. The formidable bridge of his nose nudged hers. His hand massaged at the back of her neck. _The scene of the crime_. She flinched at its significance for just a moment.

“Who am I?” he asked quietly.

 _Huh? You’re Professor McT_ – she thought for a moment, but then stopped herself.

“You’re my Daddy.”

He put the long blade of his finger under her jaw and tilted her face up to his. That dark audacity creeping into his voice again.

“And who are you?”

“I’m . . .”

She bit her lip. She knew what he was making her say and she could barely say it. The anticipation only stoked the coals.

“I’m your little slut,” she finally acknowledged. The thrill of saying it speared through her heart.

He cocked an eyebrow. “And . . .?”

She racked her brain. _You mean, just Rey?_ she thought. Who else could she be?

What had he called her?

_Oh --_

“Princess,” she remembered.

“Have I ever hurt you?”

“No.”

He inhaled deeply through his nose and measured his thoughts for a few significant moments. As if planning a course of action.

“I say this with all my authority,” he finally spoke. “You don’t get to cry this one out. You’re going to use your body to make me cum tonight. And that’s how it is.”

There wasn’t a word to name the feeling that shot through her. There weren’t words anymore, for anything.

“Get on the bed,” he whispered.

Rey didn’t even know what bed he was talking about. A quick nasty flick of his fingernail _thok_ on the soft spot under her chin shook her out of her trance. She followed him out of the bathroom half-consciously, like a blind kitten that instinctively follows the ultrasound _whoosh_ of its mother’s heartbeat. There _was_ a bedroom on this floor. Disheveled king size bed, strewn pillows and comforter. Not much else in the room. One purpose here: sleep.

And now, something else.

He didn’t give her any instructions. He didn’t have to. She crawled onto the bed in a state of ecstatic debasement, hands and knees, her thighs stiffly separated enough to feel the chill of the room on the narrowest sliver of her cunt. _Oh, Severine. Did you crave this moment I am now living? Would your salvation have started here?_

“Don’t move,” he said from behind her, his hands gripping her hips square. Everything in her expected to be speared and torn, but he merely crawled forward and insinuated his body underneath hers. Top to bottom, sixty-nine above him. He threaded his shoulders out from between her knees and pinned her calves underneath them. Even without bending her elbows the tip of his cock met her chin.

“Go ahead,” he said. She could feel the rumble of his voice on her clit. “Lick my cock,” he says. “Every time you do you get a treat.” As if to prove his sincerity he dragged his tongue up her cunt in one intoxicating slurp. Her elbows quivered and she almost got the tip of her target in her gasping mouth by accident.

He let her shudder there for a moment.

“Your turn,” he said.

 _Baby steps,_ she thought, psyching herself up. _He’s not making me suck it. All I have to do is put some part of my mouth on it. One easy little lollipop lick._ She wasn’t disinclined. The thought of finally getting to suck on this magnificent thing, to please Daddy in this most intimate and treasured of all kisses, was making her drip. But a deeply conditioned reluctance was putting the brakes on inside her. Why this push and pull? It wasn’t fair. She cursed whatever cruel lessons had been drummed into her sexuality since childhood. Someone – so _many_ people and things and institutions -- put that rubbish inside her spirit, and now it was up to her to haul that junk to the curb. She took a deep breath. _Pick one._ _What’s more difficult, the outside of your lips or the tip of your tongue?_

She licked her lips nervously and, with the jitters of a child blowing out a birthday flame for the first time, pressed her puckered lips against his supercharged flesh. It felt good. It felt silky and very warm and without thinking about it she parted her lips softly and ran a small experimental circle around and around the slit of her mouth with the tip of her tongue. The velvety drag of wet on dry, flexed on rigid, female on male.

She didn’t have much time to contemplate these binaries before she felt another long languorous lick dragging its way up through her folds. _True to his words._ The sybaritic shudder it gave emboldened her even further. She’d thought oral pleasure only went one way. But doing this, treating her tongue to the texture and drag and heat of the most sensitive part of him, was its own inverted kind of self-gratification. She widened the gap of her mouth and let more real estate of her tongue explore him. Pretty soon she was lapping at him like a dog and felt every lick in her own cunt.

“Oh. You little slut.” He squeezed her buttocks, hard, and dragged his lips up and down her cunt until her thighs quivered. “I knew it was going to be its own reward,” he said. She could feel every burst of his ragged hot breath. “I just had to sweeten the pot for you.” He parted the pink gully with his tongue and her eyes rolled up to shuddering whites at the feel of that muscled slide, back and forth, vagina to urethra to clit, back and forth, back and forth. It made her swoon.

The tickle on her urethra reminded her of a previous, pleasant sensation.

“Daddy, do you want me to piss on you?”

“Don’t change the subject,” he growled, and spanked her sharply. The whipcrack blow made her gasp. Her indignant shock faded to a chili pepper glow of arousal that suffused across everything in the blow’s vicinity. He was right. She’d very unambiguously been given a task. That spanking called bullshit on how she was vamping in the wings about it. As if in apology he soothed his tongue over her clit. The residual endorphins from the spanking made those nerves sparkle in a way they hadn’t before. If the bonne bouche was meant to soothe her, it worked.

She opened her mouth as wide as it would go and slid it down over him.

The deep guttural growl that rumbled out of him thrilled her. She didn’t know the least about what she was doing, but she liked the feel of his taut spongy glans against her soft palate, how its ridge pouted her lips with every upstroke, how she could read tiny Braille dots spelling out arousal in the skin under her tongue. He put his hand on the back of her head. She resisted, but only out of fear for him.

“I don’t want to scrape you,” she said.

“Wrap your lips around your teeth if you don’t have the hang of it yet.”

She did. It blunted her teeth’s sharp points safely enough that she was less reticent about swallowing him more deeply. But it also blunted the sensual, primal pleasure of allowing her entire mouth to roam over him as she pleased. She unwrapped her teeth and decided to take the chance, slowly and carefully, until she figured out how her teeth unavoidably factored into this dance. Maybe she nicked him with an incisor a few times, but he didn’t complain. Quite the contrary. She could feel the muscles in his body twitching and stiffening under her in reflex to when her ministrations touched the sweetest spots. And the feel of her pout sliding over him – heavenly. He kept lazily running his thumb over her clit to keep a low thrum of arousal going, but the pleasure she felt was, to her surprise, almost entirely oral.

He gave her inner labia one final love bite and pulled her hips off of him. “Between my legs,” he intoned as he propped himself up on the bed’s diagonal so she could get to him. She clambered into position, curled up between his meaty thighs like a little animal in its den. He dabbed his finger at her lower lip and she knew enough that this was her cue to suck that finger wet. He slid it out of her mouth. She watched avidly as he ran its wet tip on an inch-long stretch of the underside of his cock.

“This is where the nerves are,” he said. “Tell me what you feel when you lick it.”

She scooted forward and gave a firm exploratory lick over where he’d been touching. He was right. It felt more alive to lick him here, like there was a dialogue between her tongue and the subtle nodule of something very aroused right under the ridge. She forgot her nervousness and followed her tongue’s curiosity to run its tip, its edge, its flicking underside over that spot. Playing with that little bit of hidden gristle felt so good on her tongue that whatever sensation she was dealing out was mirrored like a phantom limb in her own clit. She felt a tremendous urge to roll her hips minutely and flex the subtle muscles around her opening, in time to what she was doing to him. The dangling temptation of the feeling made her moan. She heard him moan too, an unconscious exhalation whose tone was somewhere between disbelief and utter fulfillment.

He’d loomed over her on the couch and she’d shared a naked shower with him, but she’d never really gotten a good chance to look at his body. She raised her eyes and took in the sight of him. She knew the broad strokes of his shape already. Noticing the small details slayed her: the way how the muscles twined together under the dark hair of his armpits bore no relation to her own smooth and weak ones, the way his torso was brutal and wide and deliciously Cro-Magnon, the way an ant trail of sharp black hairs marched down from his navel into the cascade of fur that, she realized with an embarrassed giggle, was just as salt and pepper as the rest of his hair

His eyes opened drowsily. A warm smile bloomed in slow motion across his lips.

“That look in your eyes just kills me,” he said.

She wasn’t trying to give any look. She just wanted to take him in her mouth, to make sure he was happy, if she was pleasing him, if she was being the best little princess slut in the whole world. But then it occurred to her how she might look to him, this sweet-eyed virgin rolling his dick in and out and around her mouth, with nothing in her heart but a desire to please him. Her imagined reflection almost made her cum.

“I thought I was going to have to fight you a little more to turn you into the slut you wanted to be,” he said, half-laughing at the irony of it. He reached down to stroke the back of her head with his big hand. “Like it or not.”

“But I do like it.”

“Well, that’s lucky for both of us.”

She took his cock out of her mouth and crawled up the expanse of his body, until she could lay herself flat down on top of him, the tip of his erection just nudging against her pussy, as if they didn’t want to forget each other. He ran his hands through her hair and let her kiss him deep-mouthed and fervently. The skin-to-skin feeling of laying her entire naked body against him felt like vitamins and sunshine.

He asked her tenderly “ _Are_ you a virgin?”

She could hear that question’s real meaning in his voice. He wasn’t looking for verbal confirmation of something he obviously already knew. It was a Socratic question, meant to make her search her soul, to make her reframe the question she’d already asked with desperation in her voice.

 _Virgin_ suddenly seemed an impossibly broad and multi-faceted category. Physically? She’d inserted tampons. And her own fingers. Not anyone else’s, though. Not even a doctor’s. She didn’t have a hymen, if that’s the proof. Emotionally? Sure. But her lack in that department went beyond just sex. She didn’t know what it was like to be invited to a slumber party, to have someone to ride bikes with on summer vacation, to get a construction paper valentine in your locker. To be sure your birthday would be remembered by at least someone, every year. So much about how people are kind to each other was still a mystery. Sexually? Absolutely not, if she was honest. Not just because of the whiplash education in partnered sex she’d received from him in the past five hours. Her own libido, she finally acknowledged, was fully formed and very hungry. It was just a matter of time turning theory into practice. Spiritually? Well . . .

“I’ve never had anyone else inside me,” she explained, incomplete conclusion though it was. She lay her ear on his chest and wondered if she could find his heartbeat. _There it is._

“Did you ever hear Nathaniel Hawthone’s quote about a woman’s chastity?” he asked as he ran his fingertips lightly up and down her spine. “I can’t remember it exactly. But it’s basically he said that it consists of a series of coats, like an onion. And the more and more you peel off expecting to get to the core, you only discover there wasn’t ever a core in the first place.”

She had to lift her head to think about it. “I think he’s right about the first part but not the second,” she said, and suddenly realized Hawthorne’s foolishness. To think that anyone believed they could get at a woman’s true core just by peeling away her virginity. “The other party never reaches that center,” said Rey, with a sudden clarity of conviction, “because it was never in their hands to begin with.”

He didn’t say anything but gave her that charming professorial smirk she knew from class, that diffused light of a smile that emerged from behind the clouds when someone finally gave the right answer.

“Flip over,” he said softly.

She rolled off of him and sunk her body down into the bed’s vast pillowy landscape. He lay down next to her. She suddenly noticed the constellation of beauty marks studding his skin, the stars of this carnal firmament. His cock nudged up against her navel, bullying its creased rim. She pressed its blood-hot length to her belly with the flat of her hand. She was ecstatic to offer it friction and succor in a way The Bad Kid would never, ever earn.

He gasped as he ground against her. “All this and a hand job queen, too?” He crushed a kiss into her mouth, cupped her breasts and rolled indulgent circles around her nipples with his thumbs. The eye-rolling thrill of it made her left hand join her right. He was big enough for both of her hands to play at it, like that playground sorting ritual of gripping the baseball bat in a totem pole of fists until the odd kid out goes last. It was a thrill to know she was picked first for this game.

He kept kissing her, deeper, more fervently, as her hands picked up speed. She reached down to her slavering cunt and greased her entire palm as much as she could, polished it over the knob of his glans, made sure to rub its slick fluid into the sweet spot so her thumbs could play over it. The tip nudged into her belly, poking her.

He stiffened, just like she’d felt before in the theater. That drop of seawater beading at the tip. His hips nudging his cock against and into her lower belly as if trying to burrow inside it. That threshold of no turning back. Even through her trust and arousal she was a little scared. _Will it be a lot? Will he lose control? Where will it go?_ Watching his body tip into the uncharted territory of orgasmic response was new and fascinating, and she kept watching --

“It’s going to feel good on you–“ he promised in a final choked gasp, and then

_Oh_

She felt his cock stiffen to concrete for three delicious seconds and then twitch in her hands as she felt the hot pearly gush kiss in ticklish spurts onto her tender belly. Oh, that was nice. It wasn’t scary at all. The little taps of where it hit her felt good and _would probably feel amazing on my clit_ , she realized with a giddy shiver. She kept stroking him, making sure he was getting all the stimulation and pleasure he could milk out of this orgasm. She only stopped when he gently placed his big hand over hers and unpeeled it from his still rigid cock.

“Take a look,” he said, kissing her on the forehead.

She sat up a little to see what he’d left her. A pretty little spatter, right between navel and pubic hair. What wasn’t streaking down slowly to her sides was pooling in her navel, like an open locket lined with mother-of-pearl.

“It _looks_ good on you, too,” he said wryly. He twisted her face over to his and laid an unhurried tongue kiss on her mouth. “Touch it,” he intoned.

She dragged a finger through the spatter on her belly, its pearlescence reminding her of the shampoo he’d stroked through her hair. She rubbed it in an experimental circle on her belly. The circle’s circumference spiraled wider as she started to enjoy the slippery sensation of her baby hairs washing around underneath it.

“On your nipples,” he said. She obeyed. It felt very good to roll its uniquely slippery texture around her nipples. She could smell its bleachy earthiness now. She dipped her finger in the puddle on her belly again and took two fingers up to her mouth while looking him in the eye. She wanted to see him and taste him at the same time. She put her fingertips gently to her tongue, as if tasting a battery, afraid it would throw off a spark. The taste made her lips curl back a little. A little bitter, a little bleachy, a little egg yolky. The way its slipperiness decayed to a rough coating on her tongue made her recoil a little, but it wasn’t that bad. Like a first shot of whiskey that burns your throat and makes you think _more, please_. _I’ll learn to love it_ , she vowed to herself.

 _How would this feel on my clit?_ She dragged her fingers through the puddle again and almost made it past her pubic hair before he grabbed her hand. “Nope,” he said, a deadly serious look of command in his eyes. _He has a son_ , she realized. _He’s capable of making me pregnant_. The awesome power of the humble sticky fluid she’d been savoring both terrified and thrilled her. He still smiled at her boldness. “Make that appointment at student health,” he said, before running his own thumb through the puddle and popping it in her mouth. She sucked it avidly.

He removed his thumb from her mouth and lay his full length beside her. He threaded his arm in the arch where her neck didn’t touch the sheets. She snuggled into the pillow of his bicep as he dangled his fingers above her hair.

“Remember this time,” he whispered, his face close to hers. “Erase the other one. Overwrite it. Take it out of your body. Put this moment in it instead.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “This is what it’s like being cum on.”

She snuggled in, a blissful smile creasing her face. “Yes, Daddy.” The baptism of the moment in that kiss. Wiped clean of sin. Something tight and painfully wound sprung loose in her chest, right above her heart. The relief she felt wash over her in that moment was as palpably real as standing under the spray of a shower. _You and your onion take a hike, Nathaniel Hawthorne_ , she smiled. _My Daddy knows best._

He pushed her shoulder to turn her away from him, so he could wrap his arms around her and spoon against her back. She felt totally content, a small animal tucked into the warren of his care. _I guess I should get up and wash this off_ , she thought, but his chest against her back felt _so_ good, and _so_ warm, and maybe she could just wait a few moments before she had to get up, and before she knew it her bones unclenched and her eyes lowered in effortless, innocent sleep.

She barely heard him whisper “Next time’s in your mouth.”


	9. The Studio System

For one grey semi-conscious moment she was back in her dorm, asleep on the hard mattress, wrapped in thin blankets and squeezed against the cinderblock wall. Then the light from sun high in the afternoon sky pried a wedge of gold between her lashes, and she felt her body come to awareness, heavy and cosseted in the soft cocoon of his sheets.

She was still in bed with him.

His naked back radiated heat. His ribs rose and fell in time to the soft drone of his breath. The weight of his body dented the mattress, made a slope that pulled her into him, like how a planet draws a moon.

She curled up behind him, eyes bright. Now she got to spoon _him_. His back was peppered with the same coffee-colored moles. She bit her lower lip and gingerly traced imaginary constellations between them. _Here is The Big Camera, and the Little Camera. The Strip of Nitrate Stock. The Crooked Grin. The Cup of Coffee._ She wondered if her own constellation could be found in his sky.

The feathery touch of her fingers made him stir. He startled slightly, raised his shaggy head, looked at her with groggy disregard. Her heart sank. _Has he changed his mind about me?_ But then he rolled over onto his back and draped an arm around her, letting her sink into the nook of his embrace as he surfaced out of whatever dream she’d interrupted.

“Morning, angel.” His voice was rough with sleep. Feeling its vibration through her cheek felt like a bow drawing across the largest cello in the world.

“Good morning.” She smiled into her hands.

“Sleep good?”

“Yes,” she said. Brightness shining in her voice. How lovely it was to wake up next to someone.

The afternoon light slivering through the venetian blinds didn’t nag them to get out of bed. Rey lay contentedly in its warm buttery stripes and listened to him breathe. What a strange place to be with another person. _Intimate,_ and _strangers_. Two ways to know another human being, two kinds of relationship at opposite ends of a long continuum. She saw now how that continuum was really a circle. She and he hovered at the joined part where those two concepts touched, just like how their well-acquainted bodies entwined now under stripes of sunlight and a landscape of white sheets.

As if hearing her thoughts, he looked down at her.

“How old are you?” he asked gently.

It was embarrassing to admit. “Nineteen,” she confessed. Not even the dignity of a twenty to stand behind. Still just a kid, stuck in that liminal blank space between the privileges of eighteen and twenty-one. But it did feel good to tell him, to give up that secret. It made her feel closer to him. Close enough to ask the obvious follow-up.

“How old are you?”

He hesitated, too.

“Forty-six.”

She believed him, but it didn’t seem accurate. Something was calcified and resigned in everyone she’d ever met over the age of forty. They seemed to take great joy in having their vistas shriveled, in tallying the rules with a miser’s joy, in pruning everyone’s dreams. But even though everything about him had a solidity and authority that boys her age just hadn’t earned yet, he hadn’t been spiritually castrated in that last deadening way. It seemed like his real age was a number that slipped between the cracks of cruel mathematics, a number you can only count to once you believe it’s there. Maybe she was really that invisible number of years old, too.

Thinking about their ages made a nagging question surface inside her.

“The whole thing of me being a little girl and peeing in your lap . . .” She hesitated. “I mean, do you want me to _pretend_ to be a little girl?”

A slight look of revulsion flitted across his face. “No. I’m not into that. I know you’re a grown woman. I don’t have a pedophile thing.” He fingered a strand of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. “It just seemed like you needed that.”

 _I did_ , she thought.

_And no one’s ever called me a grown woman before._

Gratitude spilled out inside her like the burst of an egg yolk.

“Why are you so good to me?” she pleaded.

A flicker of humble astonishment crossed his face.

“Why are you?” he asked.

She didn’t say anything. He kept rolling the tendril of hair between his fingers. Finally he spoke.

“Do you know how long I’ve waited for someone like you?”

 _A lifetime_ , she knew. A lifetime is the same size, whether inside her small body or his matured one. You can’t measure that kind of waiting in years.

She leaned forward and kissed him, soft lazy kisses that he accepted gratefully as he cradled her face with his hand.

She knew the adorkable professor, the gentleman with the crooked, intoxicating grin and a film geek’s avocations. And she knew the demon, the forceful Daddy who demanded her obedience and subservience in a way that made her fall to pieces. In his kiss she could see the bridge between both his extremes. And she hoped that in this moment, he too could taste how the shy, dreamy teacher’s pet and the ecstatic slave were one and the same in her, too.

Every little overstimulated bit of her quivered with anticipation. But instead he broke their kiss and looked into her eyes, still cradling her face in his hand. His gaze was deadly serious, and yet . . . something in it was sly, anticipatory – the joker savoring the weightless moment before spilling the punchline he’ll know you’ll enjoy . . .

“We can talk about this now,” he said.

He kissed into her neck. Her cheeks flushed as a swirling glow of arousal started twining up her body at his touch.

“I want you to be quite clear about who you are,” he said into her neck. “You are my slut princess, and I am your Daddy.”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation. Her mouth had gone dry at the same rate her pussy had not.

His voice had taken on that dark timbre. He dropped his hand to his side and pointed down with his first two fingers, like a dog trainer’s command. “Stay.” He spread the two fingers into a V. “Open your legs.” He lifted his pointer finger and swirled a lazy circle in the air. “Undress.” He flattened his hand and flicked it dismissively. “Never mind.” His hands crept onto her waist, his palms stroking up and down the swerve of her hips. “I won’t show you those again.” His thumbs massaged deep satisfying spirals into the tightened muscle girdling her hips and butt. “I expect you to obey them. Will you?”

Rey swallowed hard and nodded.

He squeezed with his thumbs, just this side of painfully. “If you want it, say it.”

“Yes,” she said, chastened. She wouldn’t forget again.

He relaxed his grip. “You’ll have assignments,” he continued. His kisses padded up her neck to her ear. “Not just in class. Private assignments. I expect you to treat both with the same assiduousness.” He slid his fingers further down, to the insides of her thighs. Rey undulated against his touch. “Your class grades won’t change based on how well you perform the private work. And vice versa. And you’re an A student,” he said. “I expect you to keep that up, in all arenas.”

“Yes.”

“I know how much you like to touch yourself,” he said. His fingers crept against the soft slick ruffle of her labia. “I have to admit, it’s very charming.” She saw his delight in her carnality twinkle in his eyes, just for a moment, before that dark predatory gravity surfaced again. “But now you’re not to touch yourself unless I give you permission.” His fingers nudged her clit and illustrated his next point: “I’ll keep you pleasured.”

Rey’s eyes closed involuntarily as she sucked in a sweet, swooning sigh. His fingers kept softly churning against her as he kept talking in that snakecharmer whisper.

“You understand why this has to be a secret, for both of our sakes.”

“Yes,” she said. Patently obvious. Besides, she loved having a sordid secret like this.

“And I’m your Daddy. I reserve the right to sometimes give the carrot and sometimes give the stick.”

“I don’t want the stick.”

“Keep being a good girl and you won’t have to worry about it.” He kissed her. “And you are a good girl.”

She glowed.

“Do you understand?”

She nodded her head. “Yes,” she said, her joy creeping into that small word. The word that could open the world.

“Good girl.”

He slid down her body, planting kisses down her belly. He lowered his mouth and hovered it tantalizingly over her cunt. She could feel her clit practically straining to reach his lips.

“If you cum,” he said, stroking the insides of her thigh, “you’ve signed the agreement.” His calm and certain whisper tickled on her clit. He looked up at her. Tremendous want in his eyes. Want and something else . . .

. . . vulnerability?

“Will you?” he asked.

She was ready to open her mouth and voice the explicit _yes_. But he didn’t wait. He snaked a long lick in the groove of her cunt and made her gasp and quiver and claw the bed. Of course. This _yes_ wouldn’t be binding if it merely came out of her mouth. Only her entire body could agree to a contract like this. And it wanted to. Oh, god, desperately, it wanted to. It only needed the tiniest bit of _more_ , the last something that would tip its scales, spill out all the pleasure . . .

He put the very tip of his finger against her vaginal opening. She stiffened involuntarily. She didn’t mean to. She knew intellectually it was a finite space, that a tampon cannot get stuck inside her or work its way up into her recesses. But she’d never been able to sound its entire depth with her short, slim fingers. What could his much longer and thicker ones do to her? What secret part could he bruise, deep beyond the sweet ridge she knew well? _Even if he doesn’t mean to?_

He felt her stiffening in fear and backed off without saying anything.

That momentary protective reflex threw her off her groove. But the ministrations of his lovely soft lips and thick wet tongue soon put her back on the path to orgasm. She bunched the sheets between her hands and clawed her own hair and closed her eyes and gasped until her throat was dry and wanted so badly, _so_ badly, this next lick will be the _one_ , it has to _be_ , I am so overripe and ready to write my ecstatic signature on my Daddy’s agreement --

There was a sharp, rude knock on the house’s front door. Rey startled and sat up a little.

“Ignore it,” he said, still dragging his tongue against her.

But the knock pounded again, this time in a demanding _rap rap rap rap rap_. Someone on the front porch was determined to be heard.

He looked up from her crotch with more than minor annoyance. “Goddammit,” he grumbled. “Stay as you are,” he said as he shoved himself up off the bed and pulled a t-shirt over his head. “Touch yourself if you like.” He snatched a pair of sweatpants up from the floor and fumbled into them. “But don’t cum without me.”

“What is it?” she asked.

But he said nothing, only opened the bedroom door. He hesitated at the threshold a moment, like a gunslinger who expected bad news at high noon, waiting to see if the coast was clear. He lifted the collar of his shirt and wiped off his mouth. She knew why.

His hesitation unnerved her. She sat up and was just about to ask again when his hand dropped to his side. He casually pointed to the floor with two fingers.

_Stay._

Then, without looking back at her, he exited, carefully locking the door behind him.

Sealing her in.

She sat, bewildered.

She wasn’t a prisoner. She could have gotten up and unlocked the bedroom door. But he didn’t want that. There was something out there he needed to seal her away from. The thrill of following his gesture to _stay_ curdled up against her real trepidation about what was going on. The best she could do without disobeying was to strain to listen.

She heard the smooth creak of the front door opening. The low rumble of his voice, his words inaudible. Suddenly an unfamiliar woman’s voice cut through the air. It was a vinegar-sharp voice, serrated and threaded thickly with spite. Hearing that voice penetrating inside the house made Rey aware of how naked and raw and disheveled she was, how the cum he’d splattered on her last night was now peeling in ghosty shreds off her skin, like a sunburn. She pulled her legs closer to her chest in sudden shame and hugged the sheet over the mountain of her knees.

She couldn’t hear more than snatches of their conversation, but it wasn’t a comfortable one. His voice had the same menacing tension of the day he’d informed the class their papers weren’t up to snuff. Only cloudy fragments of their words floated through the closed bedroom door into Rey’s ears:

_. . . you should have told me . . ._

_. . . if you really cared this wouldn’t be an issue . . ._

_. . . that’s not fair and you know it . . ._

_. . . think this through, William, play the long game . . ._ This one another man’s voice, reedy and weak.

_. . . Rick, nobody asked you, and no one invited you in . . ._

_. . . he’s in the car. Are you coming or not? . . ._

_. . . take him. Give me fifteen minutes. . ._

_. . . is there someone else here, Will?_ The woman’s voice, rich with righteous schadenfreude. Salivating to lay into him. _That’s the reason, isn’t it?_

The front door slammed. Angry footsteps stalking closer to the bedroom. Rey’s eyes widened. She clutched the sheet over her nakedness, terrified of being found out, exposed --

_Rap rap rap._

“It’s me. Unlock the door.”

Rey scrambled out of bed. She twisted the lock open and crouched behind the opening door, hiding her nakedness. Thank god, only him. He stormed in, his face a mask of livid distraction.

“I’m going to have to send you home in a taxi,” he said as he paced. “I can’t fucking believe this.”

“What is it?”

He ran his head through his hair in exasperation. “My ex-wife is here,” he finally blurted out, “and she’s changed the time of an important event for my son, and she didn’t tell me about it. So now I look like the bad guy. And if I don’t get out of here and over to his soccer ceremony right now, her plan will have worked. And that is _not_ going to happen.”

“Oh,” said Rey. She didn’t know what to say about that. Ex-wife, son, acrimony, drama . . . no grown-up had ever before made her privy to the distasteful truths of how adults don’t know how to behave. The last great secret of grown-up-hood. It felt good to know he did truly see her as another adult. What she was supposed to do with this information was another matter all together.

He left the room again, this time without locking the door or ordering her to stay. She stayed anyway. She didn’t hear any more shouting. Just the sound of his whirlwind movement through the house, rustling and slamming and stomping, back towards the bedroom. The door opened again.

“Here,” he said. He’d retrieved her bookbag and the pile of her clothes. He was wearing his glasses again. It seemed very wrong for him to see her naked through those lenses, as though they were now back in class, and everyone knew their secret.

“Get dressed,” he said. He stripped out of his sweatpants and she saw his penis flaccid for the first time, almost to the top of his thighs, its slit peeking coyly out of what she realized must be a foreskin. Somehow the sight of him unerect was more jarring and surreal than anything they’d done together. It took a moment for her to remember she needed to shove her own body back into her dirty clothes. Her shredded underwear wasn’t in the pile. She just slid her legs into her jeans without them. The rough crease of her jean’s inside seams against her still sopping pussy felt wrong and savage. He zipped up his pants and pulled that black sweater that she loved over his t-shirt. She noticed with some pleasure he hadn’t changed the t-shirt. The smell of her would ring him all day.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, gravely serious. He pointed a finger at her. “Don’t _ever_ let a man do this to you ever again. Don’t ever put up with a man fucking you and then sending you home by yourself in a taxi.” His words were insistent and frustrated and angry. Even though he was shaking a finger at her she could tell the anger was mostly directed at himself. “I’m sorry it has to be like this. I’m so sorry. But promise me you won’t ever stand for this again.”

“I promise,” she said, utterly confused.

He stared at her with bittersweet longing. “I have to go,” he said, worry creasing his face. He impulsively bounded forward and planted a forceful kiss on her forehead. “I’ll send for the car in 10 minutes. Just lock the door behind you.”

She heard the front door slam, and a car pull away.

And then he was gone.

And the house was quiet.

And she was still here.

She stood there for a long stunned time in the dense silence of the empty house. Usually the way things went when someone gave up on her was _she_ had to go, and _they_ got to stay. Now it was the other way around.

She didn’t really know what to feel about that.

It took a few more minutes before she worked up the courage to leave the bedroom. _I can eat something here_ , she thought. _He won’t mind_. She got more orange juice from the fridge and drank it. There were some crackers in a mostly empty cupboard. She ate some of those too. She thought about eating the chocolate bars still tucked in the pocket of her hoodie. But if she did that, there would be no proof this night really happened. Maybe you could consume the past, make it disappear down your throat. She wouldn’t chance it.

She went to his study and ran her hand along the spines of his books. She desperately wanted to read one, and take it home with her. But she wouldn’t dream of doing that now. Not without permission first. There was still the dark ovoid puddle staining the couch. Something pink and ragged was half-shoved in its cushions. She pulled it out. Her underwear.

She went back to the bedroom and tucked it under his pillow.

A car pulled up. _Is this a taxi?_ She’d never taken one before. It just looked like a regular car. They don’t look like bumblebees anymore, not like they did in _Taxi Driver_. Travis Bickle. _God’s lonely man._ She at least knew you sit in the back.

“Do I tell you where to go?” she squeaked to the driver, who looked nothing like Travis Bickle.

“No, I already know,” he said.

 _The back seats of taxis are cleaner than they were in New York in the 70s_ , she thought as she ran her hands over the dove grey upholstery of the back seat. The driver turned up the radio. The sky had turned the color of the upholstery. He and his ex-wife and their son and her new husband were going to get rained on at the soccer ceremony. They were all in the half of his life she didn’t see. And she was heading back to the same hidden half of her own life. She wondered if he felt as alone as she did right now. _Of course not_ , she thought. _He’s got his son_. _And his ex-wife. Whom he hates. But her verified realness hurts me._

She sighed and shrunk down in her seat and watched the new rain bead on the window. Her wrist knocked into the hard edge of the candy bar still tucked in her hoodie pocket. She lifted out the chocolate mint bar she never even got a chance to open. Its foil was a viridescent emerald green. Peeling away one fragile corner released a burst of rich coffee and peppermint scent. She touched her tongue to the glossy chocolate block’s splintering edge. The ephemeral sensation of mint filled her head.

“I don’t have any money to pay you,” she said as they pulled up to her dorm.

“It’s taken care of,” said the driver. He wrote something in his log book as she grabbed her bag and scooted herself out of the car, closing the door behind her.

The familiar tumble of her key in the lock. Her room, so small and lonely.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. Here she was, back at the beginning. The room was the same but she was not, and the contrast between the two left her bewildered.

When she’d slept here just the morning before, she was a girlish bundle of nervous longing and naivete. Now she had returned with the Grail. The taste of his semen. His kisses, bruised onto her lips. Many orgasms written into her with his fingers and lips and tongue. His hands running luxuriously through her shampooed hair as she stood naked against him . . . did these things even happen? She blinked and looked around at her resolutely unchanged roommates: the refrigerator and the typewriter and the desk chair and the tabletop lamp. The concept of what had just happened to her was beyond them.

_Do you know how long I’ve waited for someone like you?_

And she didn’t even sign the contract . . .

She lay down on her bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to think it all through. She tried so hard eventually her brain announced _You know what? Sorry, We’re Closed_ and took pity on her, and laid her down in dreamless sleep.


	10. Golddiggers of 1933

Rey surfaced slowly out of dreams into Sunday morning. Waking up alone. Yesterday’s heartbreak ached like a half-remembered thorn in her heart. 

She hadn’t even shed her shoes before falling into a blackout sleep yesterday. Time spent in these clothes: 48 hours and counting. She tucked her nose under the collar of her t-shirt and took a deep sniff to see if she needed –  _ eurgggh _ . Yes, a shower. 

But then she remembered the reasons she was so filthy. And the renegade thrill of wearing dirty clothes -- sans panties, even – of leaving a lover’s house, of bearing a satisfying secret. All her rejection and confusion matured overnight into a maverick satisfaction.  _ A walk of shame isn’t so shameful _ , she thought with a ticklish smile.  _ Under the right circumstances, it’s actually scrumptious. _

Rinsing off under the dorm’s absolutely pitiful showerhead made her giggle. She was not sad, or confused. She was scandalously happy. She had a lover. A Daddy. A new title.  _ Slut Princess. Royalty of a secret nation. _ And what had coronated her now sluiced off her body in the rushing water. She was tempted to linger her fingers over her wet skin and skirt the letter of his law about touching herself. But Daddy reigns supreme.

The cafeteria wouldn’t open until 9 am this Sunday morning. Plenty of time to work on her film noir paper. She straddled her desk chair wearing only underwear and a t-shirt, her braless nipples nudging the cotton. She bit off a greedy mouthful of the leftover raspberry white chocolate bar and chawed the marshmallow-sweet confection while sorting out her notes. Already she could tell this effort was a different game. All the papers she’d previously written for him were full of yearning, straining, eyelash-batting. The kind of writing you do for someone whose cum you haven’t tasted. The fluttering, butterfly-kiss shuffle of the thick stack of notecards against her fingers was a new cerebral kind of foreplay, a sex act in two parts – writer and reader. Was the way her breasts jounced pleasingly against the fabric of her t-shirt as she pounded the typewriter keys a violation of Professor McTavish’s –  _ Daddy’s _ – no-touching-yourself rule? Maybe. She peeled off her shirt, just to be safe. 

**_Jean-Luc Godard famously paraphrased D.W. Griffith to declare “All you need for a film is a girl and a gun”, but The Hitch-Hiker (1953) states its purpose in its rat-a-tat gumshoe prose opening title: “This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car.” Two men, to be precise – fishing buddies Gilbert (Frank Lovejoy) and Roy (Edmond O’Brien), whose weekend mountain trip takes a detour to the Mexicali girly bar strip. That “occasion of sin” is where they’re accosted by Emmett Myers (William Talman), a sadistic hitchhiker who commandeers their car at gunpoint, forcing the men to become his chauffeur, audience, and accomplices on his lonely murder spree into the Mexican desert._ **

**_But where’s that girl? This time, she’s behind the camera. Ida Lupino directed The Hitch-Hiker, a tense, paranoid, minimalist noir (clocking in at a breakneck 71 minutes) that does for the back seats of getaway cars what Ozu did for tatami-matted rooms. It’s just one of many distinguished film and television credits earned by the actress-turned-director, the first woman to direct a noir in the genre’s golden age._ **

**_The accomplishment of being the sole female director of a noir in its first, prime flower, is notable enough, but what’s interesting about Lupino is her sheer determination to make the rules for herself – to see for herself the writing on the wall about the limitations of an actress’s options, to teach herself on set the body of knowledge she’d need as a director, to strike out on her own as an independent producer, and to expand the breadth of noir’s topics – to move beyond how James Ellroy described noir as “the genre of male self-pity” – to encompass social issues such as rape, bigamy, and extramarital pregnancy, with a sensitivity and perspective that made it clear how such social ills impacted women with special cruelty. Expect nothing less from the auteur whose director’s chair was emblazoned not with her name but the epigram “Mother Of All of Us”._ **

It felt good to write about a fearless woman. The rest of the paper poured out of her. The dawn crept up like end titles. She didn’t notice how the light of her lamp had become extraneous until she typed her last words and  _ zzzzziped _ the concluding page onto its now complete stack.

Suddenly all the good feelings whooshed out of her. It was easier to be happy about her circumstances in the charged, enchanted darkness. Now a listless, empty, Sunday-ness filled her gray and meager room. She realized how much time she’d spent yearning inside its pockmarked cinderblock walls. Not only for Daddy. Just living with that ghostly hunger, the kind that sours hope in all things. Other kids had cell phones and social media and care packages from home. They had absolute faith in always being tethered, to the people who cared, to anyone. She had nothing but the promise of Wednesday. 

Between this bleak Sunday morning and then, she realized, was sufficient time for him to decide he’d rather just be her professor. 

A rice-sized roach skittered into a crack between wall and floor.

_ Stop it _ , she thought, angry at herself for retreating back into the habit of bittersweet doom.  _ That’s not what’s going to happen.  _ But she couldn’t help fearing that, somewhere between his tongue on her clit and his son’s soccer field, it already had. She looked ashamedly at the gilt wrapper shreds of the now devoured white chocolate bar. She remembered a quote from Dorothy Parker she’d read once in a book about screenwriters:  _ Hollywood money isn’t money. It’s congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are. _

And there you are.

She bit her lip.  _ The cafeteria must be open now _ , she thought. And it’s the first of the month. That meant a full balance on her food card: $130, meant to last until the month. Maybe this time she could pace it out all the way to the 30 th this time. Usually she treated herself on the first day to a proper hot breakfast instead of just a plastic single serving bowl of cereal. But she’d already demolished that chocolate bar. If she wanted to make that $130 last, one treat a day was enough.

_ No it’s not _ , she rebutted bitterly to herself as she shoved herself into clothes she’d come to hate: utilitarian jogging bra, dingy underwear, t-shirt, hoodie, jeans that needed a quick sink scrub-out in the crotch before she could wear them again today. To think she’d worn this sexless, joyless uniform for years without complaint. Suddenly shrugging on its nihilistic drag was as tolerable as a hairshirt. Wearing ugly clothes felt like an insult to a body that could provide her with so much pleasure. The past two days had changed her. 

She wanted more.

_ Maybe I will get that hot breakfast after all, _ she thought defiantly as she stalked to the cafeteria.

Today was omelette day. She got one: cheese, sausage, onions, and green peppers, even if each extra filling cost another 30 cents. Rye toast, butter, and a tumble of aggressively paprika-ed home fries.  _ And hot chocolate, dammit _ , she thought as she carried her tray over to the hot drinks. Seeing the coffee mugs in the beverage area gave her a shivery, giggly pang of remembrance. 

_ Maybe I should try some _ , she thought.

She filled a paper cup with French Roast and took a sip. Wow. Bitter. Hot. Astringent. But strangely fragrant, like a sinister incense. Chocolate’s naughty cousin. Full of dark, elusive aromas like . . . like . . . really, like nothing else. 

_ Except tasting it on his kiss. _

Realizing that connection made a second sip more giddily palatable. She topped it off with cream and sugar anyway.

The cashier swiped her card as Rey grabbed silverware and napkins. Hearing the  _ bing  _ of the electronic transaction going through gave her a pinch of buyer’s remorse. But in her heart she knew she was doing the right thing, feeding herself.

The cashier handed her card back. “You have a $617.13 balance remaining.”

Rey blinked. “That can’t be right.”

The cashier gave her an  _ oh, please, child _ look and leaned in conspiratorially. 

“Honey,” she said, “take the money and run.”

Rey snatched up her stuff with shaking hands. She forgot about the lavish breakfast she’d looked forward to tucking into and made a beeline to the student account ATM. Her trembling hands fumbled the card into the slot on the second try. Account balance.

_ $617.13. _

She knew who put it there.

She got the sudden frantic wave poor kids get, when you’re used to good things going away. 

She stabbed her PIN into the machine and, disbelievingly, selected $400, the maximum she could withdraw. She was astonished as the machine calmly flitted out a stack of twenties, as if doling out small fortunes was the most unextraordinary request. She still didn’t believe it until her fingers touched the bills. Something about the sense memory of money’s crisp linen texture made it real.

She grabbed a Styrofoam clamshell container and quickly dumped the mess of her breakfast inside it. The bills got shoved into her bra. She darted her eyes around the room – did anyone see what she was holding? – and ran.

********

She made herself eat that omelette. It was savory and rib-sticking and she barely tasted a mouthful of it. Her dining companion was that money. It fanned out prettily on her bedspread in a flirty peacock tail of possibilities.

She closed the clamshell lid carefully and cupped her hands around her coffee. She let it warm her hands while she thought. Sometimes she sipped it. Cream and sugar made it better. She didn’t know what his love affair with this drink was all about. But it wasn’t bad. It was the kind of thing you could sip thoughtfully while getting used to the fact that you were rich. Four hundred dollars as a number on a screen felt like something that could fly away capriciously, like a startled bird. These bills were here.

And could not fly away.

A grim, sour, frightening thought furrowed her brow. 

_ Is he . . . paying me? For what we've done? _

No. That doesn’t make sense. He cared. He got her that hot dog and those chocolate bars. He knows her situation. He wants to make sure she eats.

_ But who can eat four hundred dollars worth of food? _

She picked up the fan of bills and held it in her hands. It’s funny how money isn’t really green. The back of it is. But the front engravings are as black and white as a noir. The background blushes apricot in a pastel anti-counterfeiting dusk. She sniffed the bills. New money smells inky, almost peppery.

There was a lot she needed in life. She’d gone without for so long that it strained her imagination to remember the possibilities, remember what she needed . . . 

and what she wanted.

_ Food. _ _  
_ _ Clothing. _ __  
_ Movies. _ _  
_ __ Him.

Three of those were possible today. 

A warm wave of euphoric optimism tickled at her. It was so uncharacteristic it took her a few moments to realize it must be the caffeine talking. She took another eager slurp.  _ Aha, that’s the allure. I can do all things through coffee which strengthens me. _ Of course she could treat herself. Of course that’s what he wanted. She did some quick calculations, stipend minus breakfast. He’d probably given her $500.

That’s a pretty unmistakable order to do something big.

And she did like following his orders.

_ So let’s do it _ , she smiled. She could have sworn the coffee smiled back.


	11. Breathless

The cafeteria wouldn’t break a twenty without her buying something. It shocked her to be so flush that she actually had to _spend_ money to get bus fare. She munched the molten-ly warm chocolate chip cookie she’d scored in the exchange and stared out the bus window. This trip to Finnsville was so different than the trip she took Friday night. This time she was sated: sexually, gustorially, financially, emotionally. It’s strange how finally getting what you want silences the mind. It more than silences it: it leaves a lobotomized void when you take away the jagged ball of yearning that your appetites have gotten used to rattling around. She watched the world unscroll outside her window with the blank calm cats must enjoy when perched on windowsills.

She’d forced herself to bring sixty dollars with her on this excursion. It was an act of tremendous courage to tuck those three bills into her pocket and not just bring a single thrifty twenty. _But you might want something_ , she insisted to herself, against the protective impulse to limit her spending to the absolute necessity. Bus fare, movie ticket, a snack – come on, that won’t exceed twenty bucks. But she still pointedly unfolded two more bills from the thick wad before she hid the motherload back inside her typewriter. _You don’t have to spend it_ , she finally placated herself. Carrying money took practice, like weightlifting. You can’t do it all on the first day. _Come on, Rey,_ she nudged herself. _Bring it just in case._

Rey stepped off the bus. Bad weather kept on blooming in the pearl grey sky. A spitting drizzle of cactus spine raindrops pelted her cheeks gently. The Bijou was still welcoming in the cozy Sunday gloom. Its marquee’s cheerful undercarriage of lights wasn’t any less sheltering than it was the first time she’d come here.

The ticket booth was a glassed-in kiosk underneath the marquee. The cashier put down his vintage paperback of _Farewell, My Lovely_ when he saw Rey coming.

“One, please,” Rey bent to whisper into the half-moon cut out of the bottom of the glass.

The cashier took her twenty and slid back a stack of bills, plus torn ticket. “It’s Sunday. Any feature before 6 pm.”

A happy glow settled inside Rey when she stepped into the lobby again. It was more than just the location reminding her of him. There really hadn’t ever been a place where she knew she belonged. It was a new feeling, an unclenched satisfaction. This time she noticed the gorgeous vintage posters lining the walls. Veronica Lake’s blonde and knowing gaze winked down at her from _This Gun For Hire_. Everyone seemed to love that poster. He loved it too, apparently, enough to hang it in his library room. _I want to have that poster too_ , she thought. The sudden surprise of thinking about owning something beyond the bare minimum. Something of beauty, to enjoy.

The theater’s schedule was also posted on the wall. Whoever was in charge of booking must be someone of a precise and restless temperament. There were two different matinees and an evening show for every calendar day. _Selecting a theme for each month must be the only way to keep sane_ , she thought. Today was the last day for “Partners in Crime”. Of course. _Gun Crazy_. She scanned the shows she’d missed. _Natural Born Killers, Bonnie and Clyde, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Queen & Slim, Badlands, Sid and Nancy, Bound, Butterfly Kiss. _This first of the month started “Foodie Films”: _Tampopo, Babette’s Feast, Chocolat, Big Night, Waitress, Eat Drink Man Woman, Like Water for Chocolate, Soul Food, Julie and Julia, Spirited Away._ The titles made her salivate even though she’d eaten plenty this morning.

And then she remembered:  
_If I’m hungry,  
I can eat._

The same vibrantly attired young woman was working the concession stand again. “Hey!” she chirruped. “I remember you! You were with Tall Glasses Guy. He’s always here.”

 _Oh god._ Rey blanched for just a moment – _are we caught?_ – but quickly realized the woman was just being friendly. Her name tag read _Galaxie_ in elegant Art Deco letters. _What a great name_ , Rey thought admiringly.

“We got a new chocolate sample,” said Galaxie. She reached under the counter and pulled out an opened bar. “White Miso and Buckwheat Honey. I don’t think management is going to carry it. But you can have a taste.” She broke off a substantial piece of the creamy topaz bar and handed it to her.

Rey put it to her tongue. _Yum._ Earthy, savory, the taste of wildflowers. Pleasantly cloying, with a sassy saline finish.

“Wow, that’s good,” she said, rolling her tongue over her teeth. “Why won’t they carry it?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. I guess they think it’s too weird. But if people are coming in for the foodie film series I don’t know why they wouldn’t try it.” She leaned over to look at the bars still in the case. “Do you like dark or milk or white chocolate?”

“I think I like it all,” gushed Rey. She scanned the other flavors. Georgia Peach Cream Cheese, Sea Salt Cashew, Candied Orange. “Can I have a Mexican Hot Chocolate?” she pointed. The dancing chili pepper motif winding its way around the wrapper dared her to try it.

Galaxie put the bar on the counter. “Something to drink?”

_Oh, why not?_

“A small coffee,” said Rey. “With lots of cream and sugar.”

“All the fixings are over there.” Trixie nodded across the lobby as she poured hot java into a paper cup. “What are you seeing?”

Rey handed over the stack of bills. “Just whatever’s here, I guess.”

“Well, we didn’t get the print of _Kitchen Stories_ in time so we’re running _Breathless_ for one more day.”

“You still project on film?” Rey asked, astonished. She thought all-celluloid movie theaters were dead. Every multiplex had made the switch to digital years ago. Forget the romance of the man in the projection booth, pulling the strings, making the magic. Here’s how the picture gets on the screen nowadays: A manager climbs the stairs, listlessly punches a few buttons, and a satellite feed of trailers, feature, and too many ads beams down. Moviegoing nowadays is nothing more than glorified hi-def TV with $8 popcorn.

Galaxie nodded with great pride. “Yup.” Rey could tell that, even though her job was just selling popcorn, this truth mattered to her. “We’ve got projectors for 16, 35, and 70mm. The only thing we can’t show is Super 8 or IMAX. _Breathless_ starts in seven minutes,” she said, pointing to the clock. “You’ll make it.”

Rey settled in her seat and sipped her coffee and thought about how absurdly easy it had been to find friends lately. Joy in the A/V library had been nice to her. Galaxie had been nice to her. Strangers had never treated her like this before. She didn’t know what had changed. Maybe those who love film could tell she spoke the same language, belonged to their tribe. It felt good to have a tribe.

The lights went down. Sure enough, if she listened carefully, she could hear the white noise rattle-purr of a projector high above her in the booth, the sword-unsheathing _psssheeeeek_ sound of where a warped metal reel glanced against other metal. Around and around and around, and the opening title. _Ce Film Est Dédié A La Monogram Pictures_. _This film is dedicated to Monogram Pictures_ , the sensationalist Poverty Row studio whose shameless B-movie verve inspired Jean-Luc Godard to make his own movies. _The only thing you need is a girl and a gun._

A shiver of excitement squiggled over Rey as she settled in her seat. She’d never seen a movie by the king of the French New Wave before. She took a bite out of her chocolate. The swelling heat of cinnamon and cayenne smouldered across her lips just as Jean-Paul Belmondo ran his insouciant thumb across his.

But her excitement quickly faded to boredom, then disappointment, then outrage. She knew how essential, how _groundbreaking_ this movie was to the pantheon, how Godard had broken all the rules of Hollywood editing to tell a restless, raw gangster film, how there would be no MTV or Tarantino or mumblecore without the furrow he’d plowed. But what was the _point_ of this movie? Who _were_ these people? Their breezy existentialism nauseated her. They smoked, they dawdled in rooms, they paced around and made faces at themselves in the mirror and casually flung out cruelties like “I haven’t decided whether I’m in love with you.” Some hope swelled in Rey’s heart when the doomed duo went on the lam together, but in the end the woman betrayed the man with the same passionless detachment. When he died and cursed her as _degueulasse_ – the prim subtitles said “lousy”, but Rey knew it meant more than that – she couldn’t help but agree. The lights went up on her scowl. _What’s the point of selling the audience on the promise of a dyad,_ she glowered _, if in the end you just let them down?_

But for all her contempt, she couldn’t resist the allure of Jean Seberg’s breezy continental style. She knew whom it would displease if she pixie-cut her hair like that. She’d die losing an opportunity to have him wash it again. But that wide-collared striped dress, and white heels, and dark-lensed _lunettes de soleil_ – ooh la la. That seemed to be where the movie’s poetry lay: not in its scant plot but in dreaming of oneself as a heroine _à la Fran_ _çaise_ , clothed in crinolines and existential chic. _How do you write about a movie as a feeling?_ she puzzled to herself. Not that she’d been assigned to. But she could see how the essay was an insufficiently stiff form to capture this butterfly in a jar. Not even a jar. In two cupped hands.

She tried to decipher the _how_ as she tossed her cup and wrapper in the lobby trash. The rain outside had stopped. A lemony attempt at sunshine was poking slits in the clouds. Maybe a walk would clear her head.

She hadn’t explored Finnsville before. She knew _of_ it – Hipstertopia, Little Portland, The People’s Republic of Finnsville. Honestly, it didn’t deserve those over-the-top monikers. It was just an easy, cute, friendly strip of spots that felt welcoming to thinkers and dreamers: bookstores, record shops, art spaces, coffeehouses, a 24-hour diner, a dive bar. There were corner groceries and barbers and hardware stores, too. People lived here. They made homes in the well-worn brownstones and turned out for street fairs and clean-up days. It was an actual place, not the idea of a place. A wall-spanning mural proclaimed in thorned graffiti lettering IF YOU WERE HERE I’D BE HOME BY NOW.

Rey ran her fingertips over the mural’s scrubby brick and thought about how she didn’t like _Breathless_. Before, she’d have been so cowed by its status as A Very Important Movie that she wouldn’t approach it with anything other than reverence and humility. But now its pedigree didn’t seem so intimidating. It was just a movie. She could feel about it any way she liked. And she knew enough about herself now to know how it feels when you like something, and when you don’t. _Maybe this confusion is just the growing pains of how you develop taste_ , she thought. _Maybe this happens to every critic._

The mural petered out around the edge of a broad store window. _All Dolled Up, Consignment & Vintage_. Its window display was a jumbled thicket of outrageously garbed mannequins peeking out from a forest of kooky tchotchkes, as if all of the 20th century had collided into itself.

Rey couldn’t help being uncharacteristically gobsmacked by the display. It wasn’t like her to be passionate about clothing. _Wait. That’s not true_ , she realized. The memory of why she’d lost that passion pushed into her like a red-hot needle. She’d loved that red dress. The one whose specialness had been torn from her when she’d been made to wear it as punishment. That marked the last time she’d been brave enough to feel pretty, before someone turned the pleasure of adornment against her.

There was a flouncy shirtwaist dress from the 1950s in the window. Its nipped-in waist marked it as genuinely vintage, the kind of outré hourglass silhouette that requires a girdle. It wasn’t dashingly striped like the one in _Breathless_ , but its cotton was dotted with tiny cerulean sparrows, their scissor tails darting this way and that across an expanse of alice blue sky. It was very pretty. If she was brave she would ask to try it on. That would require bothering a salesperson, asking them to undress the mannequin, what a hassle for little nobody her.

But that money was burning a hole in her pocket. _An unmistakable order to treat yourself_ , she recalled.

And if she bought the dress? And wore it to school? Made everyone who knew her as the little nothing in hoodie and jeans do a double-take? How would _that_ go over? She’d be a target of more mockery, the only student dressed like Grace Kelly for a garden party that was never going to happen.

But it was so pretty.

And maybe he would like to see her in it. _And out of it._ Her heart pounded just thinking about it.

 _I can at least ask,_ she thought. She tried to imagine how the swooshing folds of the skirt would feel brushing coolly against her legs, how the explicitly tailored bodice would hug her precisely. Maybe imagining the sensual pleasure of wearing it could outpsych her reluctance. _I can ask._

She went in. The chime of the door, the musty perfume of hundreds of clothes with a history crowded together, the warbling bossa nova of an Yma Sumac mambo playing on a crackling 45 near the cash register. Rey walked up to the brassy middle-aged woman behind the counter and swallowed hard.

“Could I try on that dress in the window?” she asked.

And a few moments later Rey stood in the dressing room in her underwear, contemplating the label sewn into the dress’s neckline. _Frocks by Francine, JAnnahton 5-4775_. This was custom sewn for someone, once upon a time. Cut and tucked and hemmed to fit another woman’s body with great care. Someone who was loved. Rey raised her arms and slid the parachute of the voluminous skirt over her head, wriggling her torso into the rumpled cloth until a dress settled into shape around her. She was wearing it. She’d actually done it.

“Knock knock.” The owner entered, tape measure slung over her shoulders. “This is actually a good fit, honey. It’s the right length for you,” she said, gently sweeping her hands around where the dress’s waistline exactly bisected Rey’s navel. “But it’s a little wide.” She pinched at where the bustline and waist darts bagged. “That’s an easy alteration. But you can’t wear a sports bra with it,” she warned. “You need an actual foundation to keep the dress’s shape. We’ve got vintage bras if you want to try one on. What size are you?”

 _That would mean removing her exoskeleton._ The hoodie to hide inside, the sports bra to bind her, the grubby sneakers to make a fast getaway. If she bought this dress, even if she skipped the white stilettos Jean Seberg wore in favor of a pair of simple ballerina flats, she’d have to give up all the rest of her uniform. Being clothed in the wrong things is sometimes more frightening than being naked.

She twisted to look at handwritten price tag dangling from the sleeve. _$75_.

The owner saw her. “Just to let you know, honey, vintage cotton dresses in good condition like this are rare. This one’s a steal at that price.”

“I’ve only got $40 with me,” she hedged.

“Layaway’s just a 50% deposit. You can come back tomorrow with the rest.”

She bit her lip. “Let me think about it.”

The owner shrugged. “Take your time, honey.” She closed the dressing room door with a _clik_.

Alone in the dressing room Rey realized she hadn’t seen herself in it. She turned to the mirror and inhaled a little gasp.

This was the first dress she’d worn since she was a very small girl. The vulnerability, the nervousness, the relief of it all welled up in her at once. It took a moment for the emotions to settle inside her before she could really think about whether she liked it.

And to her surprise, she didn’t. The faint fragile blue that looked so fresh and spring-day in the window didn’t flatter the warmth in her skin. The 1950s silhouette didn’t belong on her, either. It felt too conforming, too suburban chaste. The dress was wearing her instead of the other way around.

She could imagine wearing this in a French movie. Him and her having a picnic, baguettes spread with butter and sliced radishes, a bottle of wine. He would whisper sweet nothings to her in English subtitles and creep his fingers under her hem. But as entrancing as that fantasy was, she knew why it would never happen.

He would never be happy to see her in it . . .

because she was not happy in it.

And he would know.

And care.

She unbuttoned the dress’s shirt front and hung it carefully back on its hanger.

On the way out she spotted a long-sleeved top hanging on a rack. It had narrow horizontal black and white stripes and a wide Bardot collar spanning from shoulder to shoulder. She rubbed its thin cornsilk-y knit between her fingers. It was a springy synthetic, from a more casual time in the past. She wouldn’t need a vintage bra to fill it out.

She exited the store with a smile. Walking back to the bus stop wearing that top under her hoodie did make her feel like a Godard heroine, in the best way.

She passed by the theater again on the way back to the bus stop. On impulse, she ducked back into the lobby to grab the calendar of this month’s shows. There was a stack of job applications nearby.

“Do you have a pen?” she asked Galaxie. She did. Rey filled out the application as best she could. Where it asked for her phone number she put the number of the forgotten pay phone in her dorm’s common area. Maybe it received incoming calls. She might just have to check back at the theater in person instead. “I’ll put in a good word for you,” Galaxie sang out as she waved goodbye. “Have a good day.”

When Rey got home she hung the calendar up on her wall. It was the first decoration she’d ever had in this room.

 _I’ve still got homework_ , she remembered. She opened her bookbag and reached for her math textbook.

Inside her fingers touched crumpled paper. She frowned. _What is this?_ She pulled it out. It was a brown paper bag, the kind kids pack their lunch in. It had shifted upside down inside her bookbag and she almost dumped out the heavy thing inside it before lifting it out.

She peered inside.

She didn’t know what she was looking at. She tipped the thing into her hands.

It was a curved, ridged rod of smooth pink glass, five inches long and just wide enough to have some weight in her hands.

There was a sticky note attached to it.

It read "Homework".


	12. Chapter 12

She knew what it was. Even a virgin could figure that one out.

It was cool in her hands. She tapped the tip of it against her lower lip. Colder even than her stingily heated room. It’s funny how you never notice glass’s subtle deficiency of warmth until you worry about where five inches of it might be going.

 _I don’t want this_ , she thought.

That fleeting thought of defiance was so unlike her. The fact that she’d even thought it was testament to how today’s indulgent adventure had changed her. His touch, his body, his attention, his care, his dominance – those things had taught her what she wanted. But the largesse of that $500 boon had helped her learn what she didn’t want, too.

And even though he’d given this to her, even though she was certain he’d selected it with exacting consideration, even though it was obvious his wish was for her to use it . . .

. . . she didn’t want it inside her. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t human. She felt like she was being asked to commit adultery with a knick-knack.

_It wasn’t him._

It wasn’t just that it was a toy. Or that he wasn’t here. To her way of thinking, she and he had separated toy sex all the time. Every paper she’d ever hammered out on her typewriter for him was a richly erotic partnered experience, even if the writing and the reading of it were separated by time and space. She pounded out every word, every satisfying inky dent of letters in paper, thinking only of him, how her thoughts, this outpouring of her essence, could please him. A literary fellatio. _To stroke_ : the verb for how you hit a typewriter key, and the word for what you do to a lover’s body. And the tool of her typewriter was a welcome intermediary in that cerebral coitus: a sex toy with 44 keys. 

But this cold crude slug now in her hands had no breath of life. The maidenly blush in its pink glass mocked the vitality of a real penis. Remembering how the velvet-hard vigor of the genuine article felt against her hands and mouth and clit made her wince with teeth-grinding _saudade_.

She cursed herself for stiffening in reflex when he’d tried to penetrate her with his finger. He’d so gently nudged her, just inside the nook of where her hymen used to be, just enough to tug the softest of her skin. And she’d flinched, like an idiot. He wouldn’t have jabbed it into her. What was she thinking? That instinctive lapse of trust, no matter how unconscious, had led her here. And now doing dutiful exercises with this clumsy dead thing was her punishment. Maybe he didn’t intend it as punishment. But it sure felt like drop-and-give-me-twenty.

And it was so _puny_ , too. She’d gotten spoiled.

She sighed deeply.

 _I’d so much rather this was you_ , she thought. 

And then she imagined his whispered snort of amused disdain –

_Kitten . . . who said you were ready for me?_

Chastened. _Yes, Daddy_.

She tentatively slipped the toy’s polished head through her lips, into her mouth’s lollipop space. Not such an ice cube, not really. Its frictionless gloss gave off no flavor. Her tongue could skate over the tip at much slipperier speeds than it could over his own anatomy. The glass clinked against her teeth, as if proposing a toast. 

_Salut, slut._

The sticky note had fluttered to the floor. She picked it up. 

Only then did she realize he’d also written on its other side.

This was the first time she’d seen his handwriting. It wasn’t all crouching lowercase beads like hers. It was hasty block capitals, narrow and urgent, like that of an overcaffeinated architect. The horizontal slashes of the Es and Ts tilted up like airplane wing flaps, as if impatient to fly away. 

He’d written a list:

WARM THE GLASS ONE IN HOT WATER BEFORE ALLOWING IT TO TOUCH ANY PART OF YOUR ANATOMY.

 _Shit_. She’d already broken that instruction. But knowing she could remove the toy’s chill gave it a little more life in her eyes. She kept reading.

DO NOT FORCE IT. YOU MAY TOUCH YOURSELF IN ANY CAPACITY YOU DEEM NECESSARY TO MAKE YOURSELF WET AND RELAXED. I ALLOW THIS.

 _Oh, yes._ She had unquestioningly obeyed his edict of locking all her orgasms to his capable technique. But she did miss the tasty, entirely private joy of coaxing selfish pleasure out of her own body at her own demand. This was ice cream and Disney out of nowhere.

YOU WLL ISSUE A CANDID AND THOROUGH VERBAL REPORT TO ME ABOUT ANY AND ALL SENSATIONS YOU EXPERIENCE. SO TAKE NOTES.

 _Written notes?_ she thought as she weighed the toy in her hands. _Or just mental notes?_ Now that she’d been given some direction, maybe his gift wasn’t so grotesque. Its gentle unicorn horn spiral and thoughtful upward curve wouldn’t be an assault of sensations. She licked up its shaft to make sure. Her tongue got a hint of the cheap grade school thrill of running your hands across the rhythm of a chain-link fence. The mildest training wheels of a sex toy. _Maybe just mental will be ok. I can’t imagine him wanting me to stop whatever I’m doing to scribble down notes._

No signature on the sticky note. Just a little hastily scribbled heart. Almost folding in on itself, as if too bashful to be drawn. 

That scribble made her own heart gladden. A submissive trusting calm enveloped her. He wasn’t just throwing this thing at her and expecting her to swallow it whole. Daddy would never, ever do that. 

_The succor of the invisible yoke. The bit in my mouth._

Yes, Daddy.

She rummaged in her trash and fished out this morning’s paper coffee cup.

Moments later, the rinsed coffee cup was back on her desk and filled with scalding water from the bathroom tap. The toy marinated in its private hot tub while she slid entirely out of her clothes. She stood naked before having a second thought.

_His gift._

She grabbed the striped top she’d bought with his money up off the floor. Its cornsilky knit felt so good against her naked skin as she slithered it back on over her torso. Its eased fit pulled up over her breasts easily. She rubbed her nipples gently with her fingertips. That exhilarating candied tease that made her clit jump in homecoming made her sigh. Oh, the joy of touching herself again.

She took the toy out of its bath at a temperature somewhere between hot potato and warm puppy.

The tide of her desire came in as soon as she crawled under her covers, naked except the shirt, warm scepter in hand. _The pull of the moon of him._ She inhaled deeply at the shirt’s collar, as if trying to smell the perfume of his generosity. She desperately wanted something that wore his scent. This was the next best thing.

She was not conflicted now. Under the covers she ran the length of the toy between inner and outer labia. Oh. So pleasant. She’d never imagined glass like this. Glass was that stuff that broke, smashed into shards, stabbed the bare soles of your feet if you didn’t watch where you were walking. But now she saw you could tame its silicon lava, coax it into a treat for your body as swirled and delectable as soft serve ice cream.

She dragged the toy’s corkscrew up and down through the length of her labia. _Oh_. She could feel every subtle bump of it with luscious clarity. Its violin bow upstroke nudged her clit. _Oooh ooh ooh_. She rolled a nipple between her fingers and squirmed under the sheets. It had been so long. She’d forgotten the voluptuous amusement of making herself come. The one treat that’s the same price for rich and poor, that requires nothing but a little privacy and a greedy commitment to ecstasy.

 _Am I allowed an orgasm before I put Daddy’s gift inside me?_ she thought. It would make her WET AND RELAXED, his explicit instructions. She nudged her clit less tentatively than before. Its nerves sang out. _Does Daddy allow it?_ How she was not stopping – could not stop -- while pondering the answer was really skirting the law now. But it felt so good. Oh, _so_ good. Pleasure takes the wheel if you wake it up enough. She could feel her face flushing, that butterfly-wing blush that was one of her road signs on the path to orgasm.

ANY CAPACITY YOU DEEM NECESSARY.

Her pace quickened. Her finger would cut to the chase. A finger always has a ridge on it, a hangnail, an untrimmed fingernail, a little piece of grit in the otherwise blissful experience. This utterly smooth thing had nothing on its surface to avoid. It was the platonic ideal of being touched, incarnate. The orgasm it was conjuring up was so unlike the hasty, foot-clenching way she’d learned from her own body. It spread in an erotic warmth in the spaces that would touch a horse’s saddle – cunt and butt and insides of her thighs, a giddy chili-pepper glow that didn’t dump out like an overturned cup –

\-- but instead jostled at its trembling, overfilled rim

\-- and spilled

_Oh_

\-- and spilled

\-- and spilled

 _Ohhhhhh_. Does this even count as an orgasm? It was so different. In some ways it was better. Her slavering pussy told her so.

She slid the toy’s tip to the nook where she’d stopped his finger.

 _I’m not afraid of your gift now, Daddy_.

and slid the tip just in

She gasped, sucking air in through her teeth. This was a new experience of the inside-outness of her, the topological marvel of women’s bodies.

and a touch deeper

Those first few centimeters have a tugging, elastic sweetness. She blissfully nudged it, back and forth, a microstroke that was just enough to convince her in-and-out was nothing to be afraid of.  
The toy’s tip nudged against a speed bump inside her, a little spongy ridged hill of something solid as bone. She slid the toy over and past.

_Oh jesus_

She was in new territory now, a place that she’d hastily scuffed up with tampons and left alone. How had she never notice there was something pleasurably, succulently deep hidden under the veil? Forceful pressure stoked a new and earth-shattering sensation. That glow she’d felt earlier now smouldered like a supernova. The space forked subtly into two trenches. She dragged the tip in the left and then the right and almost fell apart at the deep, plunging satisfaction.

She was not shy with her strokes now.  
Thought ended. Sentences ended. The kind of vocabulary-rich typewriter sex she’d craved was impossible now.

And in that wordless space thick with pleasure came the thought:

_I want him inside me_

This wish was not a sexual fantasy, a kind of erotic conjecture. This was a real wish. A break in the hymen of reality. A readying. A change.

_I want him to fuck me_

The sensations in her were darkening to the color of blackberry jam. Rich, base note sensations, more than a tickle. They had grown to an intensity she’d never felt in her body before. Their power astounded her like a wall-sized ocean wave. They almost hurt. She couldn’t stop. She wouldn’t stop. That pleasure was knocking something loose – not in body but in soul. Something spiritual had lodged there, in that secret spot, floated to its bottom and tucked away there by her merciful body. She saw now there was more than deep overwhelming pleasure there. It was where her body protected her, locked away its most damning feelings. It was jarring loose now, spilling out, welling in her heart, spreading into that about-to-cry tightness in her throat

and then she did cry

a wish made in tears

a layer of Hawthorne’s onion,  
peeled away

Now it hurt. She had to stop, and gasp, pull the thing out, let her tears leak unbidden from the corners of her eyes, curl against her pillow, purged, spit out what she had swallowed and locked away in the tenderest part of her. Whoever said you carry your tension in your neck didn’t know where the motherload lies.

To feel again

_Did he know this would happen?_

_Did he want this for me?_

She lay there, changed.

When words came back to her she followed the pull to her typewriter. _Zzznip_ , a fresh piece of paper. Lines and margins didn’t matter. She let the words dance.

**_I pledge this to You,_ **

**_written in twisted molten sand:_ **

**_there is a cave and you are welcome, those words married to thank you,_ **

**_thank you,_ **

**_thank you,_ **

**_thank You_ **


	13. Chapter 13

“So! Asian film.” Professor McTavish clapped his hands together and smiled eagerly at the class. “We’re going to take a detour and, uh, back up a bit before we keep moving forward with Western cinema.”

It was Wednesday, and Rey was right where she belonged: in the semi-dark of a theater, notebook in front of her, lover so close. Lover of her, lover of movies. Bearer of their secret. It burned and twinged inside her when she ducked past him this morning. He’d conspicuously ignored her too, gulping coffee and shuffling lecture notes with stony disregard. What crackled between them in the sordid ultraviolet spectrum of their pact was only for her to know.

She’d heard that sparkling crackle every moment of this week. She dared to play hooky yesterday, a first for Miss Goody-Two-Shoes. _What are they going to talk about in Poly Sci, the Teapot Dome scandal? Psssh, I’ll read the book._ She luxuriated cozy under the covers for a day and rocked delicious orgasms out of her body with his glass ambassador, napping and coming and reading and napping and coming again, until all her hoarded heartbreak was knocked loose and the now very awake cynosure of pleasure inside her glowed only with confident carnality.

Last night she’d roused at dusk-ish and went back to the Bijou alone. _Tampopo_ , the first of the foodie series. Galaxie played concession stand sommelier, picked for her a matcha-and-rose-flavored white chocolate bar to savor. The grassy perfume of its sweet delicate fragrance twined up through her head just as the nattily white-suited _yakuza_ swain stood up from his own theater seat and asked Rey, through the fourth wall: “Oh, are you watching a movie too?” _Yes, I am!_ she beamed, so happy for their shared good fortune. Sweet-hearted Tampopo, the beleaguered widow running a pitiful roadside ramen joint, saved by cowboy trucker gourmets who know the noble Way of The Noodle. _Tampopo_ ’s gustatory lust for life made her hungry. Not the painful way she knew from deprivation. She was too well-fed under his care for that anymore. This was a good, eager kind of hunger, ripe with anticipation.

She followed that good hunger into a ramen shop on Finnsville’s main drag. The afternoon opened up its predictable downpour just after the hostess tucked her into her snail shell of a booth, warm and dry. The rain streaked against the wide windows in soft thrums and turned the world outside into a wall of gray wool and white noise. She didn’t know what to order from the picture menu and just pointed at what looked the most comforting. Minutes later a soulful bowl of ramen steamed politely before her, awaiting contemplation.

She remembered the movie’s gentle satire of an aged ramen sage giving Zen-chowhound instructions to a young man on how to eat it: _First, observe the whole bowl._ Rey did as he said and beheld the sleek, fat-veined slices of pork bobbing over the primordial tangle of noodles. Crimson reflections from the restaurant’s neon sign quivered delicately on the steaming broth’s surface. She pinched two chopsticks around a slippery mouthful and tried to slurp, Japanese-style. Even if her technique was clumsy the dish still worked its magic. It was food that made you sigh deeply, food that put its hands on your shoulders and stroked your hair. She ate in deep, seduced concentration. When she swallowed the last of the porky, velvety broth she could only sit silently, like a character in a haiku, and tally rich _five-seven-five_ syllables in her quieted mind:

 _Empty bowl, wet sky  
Only the perfume lingers  
of tonkatsu broth_  
  
She ended the week’s honeymoon of indulgence at a Finnsville corner store. Weekly shopping this time could be a wedge of good Jarlsberg and baby-soft fresh apricots instead of the usual string cheese and apples. Handing over the money to the cashier made her glow with gratitude again about how he’d made this possible. She bought a gallon of purified water, too, so she wouldn’t have to drink the slightly rusty brew from her dorm faucet.

Back home the clean water went down like champagne.

And now she was back in class, fed, rested, wearing that vintage striped shirt _a la nouvelle vague_ , looking as pretty as she dared to be for her lover. Her teacher. Her Daddy. She felt happy enough to burst.

“Okay, quick point of business before I begin,” he announced to the class. “I got some emails about make up assignments, about whether I offer them. I’ll repeat what’s already in the syllabus: I assign homework once. ONCE.” He shot a pointed stare around the room before opening up his hands. “Let’s have your film noir papers.”

An awkward lack of activity in the room made clear why the announcement was necessary. Only a few students passed papers forward over the shoulders of their cringing slacker classmates. Rey rummaged in her bag for her own typewritten paper. Her fingers briefly brushed the brown lunch bag still crumpled down in the bookbag’s bottom. _Homework._ She strummed her fingertips on the crumples briefly and smiled. Most dads leave a note and a treat in their kid’s lunches. _My Daddy’s note and treat for the win._

“So let’s talk about Asian film.” He tossed the slim stack of papers aside before bounding up on the stage, in that one strong smooth hoist of his big body that still made her flutter every time he did it. “Let’s remember that Asia is a tremendous geographic area.” He drew a blobby map on the wipe-off board in red marker. “Not just China, Korea, Japan. Asia is as far north as Siberia,” he said, swapping markers and swirling a green dot at the scrawled map’s upper right. “And as far south as Indonesia.” Another green dot. “And some schools of critical thought include the cinemas of Central Asia, the Middle East, and Egypt, which is North Africa.” Dot, dot dot. He connected all the points in a wide green parallelogram before capping his marker. “So you can see what a disservice it is to try and cram all of Asian cinema into one or two classes.”

Rey sketched her own quick geographic blob in her notes. She couldn’t help making the dots into doodled hearts.

“But since this is an _overview_ of film history,” Professor McTavish continued, pacing the stage, “I’d be remiss to exclude certain figures. So, with apologies to everyone we have to exclude – and with an understanding that our focus is historical, not contemporary cinema – I’ve narrowed it down to three auteurs.” He held up three fingers and counted off the names. “Sergei Eisenstein, from Russia. Satyajit Ray, from India. And Akira Kurosawa, from Japan.”

He lowered his counting hand to his side.

No one but Rey noticed he’d curled one finger back.

Pointer and middle finger parallel, pointing down.

_Stay._

Rey stiffened. No one else noticed. No one else would have known. A fluttering delirium started rising up in her. _The language of flowers_. Courting Victorians delivered secret messages in floral semaphore, lurid declarations hidden in plain view in the bouquet on the mantle. _Ranunculus blossoms mean I Am Dazzled By Your Charms. Pink camellias mean Longing For You. Two fingers pointing at the floor during class means I Have Not Forgotten You Are My Slut Princess._

He didn’t make eye contact with her. That dismissive, casual confidence that she would obey only made her throb more.

She swallowed hard and folded her hands together and refused to twitch and flex where it would feel _so_ good. _Because Daddy didn’t say so._ The relief of knowing he hadn’t forgotten about her. The balm of his attention washing away all the morning’s necessary, feigned disdain.

_Daddy said to stay._

“We’ll start with Kurosawa.”He wrote the names _Akira Kurosawa_ and _Toshiro Mifune_ on the board and underlined both. She did the same in her notes. “We can’t discuss Kurosawa’s work without discussing his long collaboration with the actor Toshiro Mifune. These two names familiar to anyone?” He held up two fingers in a V for victory sign. Innocently scanning the room for the answer while oh-so-casually dropping his hand to his side.

Keeping that victory V.

_Spread your legs._

A dangerous flick of a look at her. Not because he knew she wouldn’t obey. Just because he wanted to see her do it.

Rey’s pulse metronomed in double time in the softness under her jawline.

Lust tunneled her vision. She scooted forward and separated her trembling knees. He couldn’t see the way her cunt pulsed with heat under the crotch of her jeans. But she felt the crackle surge between them. He knew.

His eyes gave nothing away. But they didn’t leave hers. He reeled off facts about Toho Studios and the samurai archetype and filleted her with his gaze. She tapped and wriggled her toes inside her shoes to distract herself from the increasingly all-consuming impulse to do something, _anything_ to scratch the demanding itch he was conjuring up inside her. Wasn’t that how everything started between them, anyway? Being brave enough to masturbate in front of him in class? She wouldn’t even have to brazenly rub herself with her fingers, like before. It would be her entirely discreet relief if she twitched her clit just enough to rub its pearly bead on the inside of its own hood. Another miracle of the joy button, that it was clothed in its own pleasure sleeve, and with the precisest, subtlest motion you could massage it in secret, anywhere you wanted.

Even under Daddy’s watchful eyes . . .

if you were brave enough to disobey.

 _That’s a big “if”._ This week’s temporary amnesty on self-pleasure, over too soon. _Not fair_. She caught herself actually scowling, like a toddler convinced she’s been wronged. The pull of her frown felt heavy on her chin. Those weren’t muscles she used often. The scalding weight of too many disappointments had paralyzed them. _No point in pouting if you never win anyway._ But the triumphs he’d made possible demolished that lie. She’d won, many times, in many ways lately. This new petulance wasn’t just brattiness. This displeasure was satisfaction’s beautiful obverse. _Can’t awaken one without the other. Can’t know what you’re worth without both on the scales._

His narrowed eyes measured her scowl. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw a flash of enjoyment crinkle around them. Maybe he enjoyed making her squirm and pout. Maybe he knew she’d figured out the bigger truth.

She remembered, with a gulp and a shiver, that there were more hand gestures.

“It’s not often that a director and an actor have the kind of soul-deep connection that Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune had,” he continued, as if nothing was happening in the raw ultraviolet between them. “Kurosawa said that no actor ever impressed him with Mifune’s intensity, and Mifune said that he was not proud of any of his work except for the films he did with Kurosawa. Their talents fed into each other in a positive feedback loop.”

He spun his finger around in the air to illustrate the whirlpool of their synergy.

_Undress._

This was it. The signal she knew was coming.

_The yoke of his command, knitting around her neck_

Kicking her shoes off would just anger him. Dawdling under the letter of his law had never served her well.

 _Naked in class._ The biggest cliché among all the nightmares.

He had never intentionally humiliated her before. Maybe he knew humiliation’s litany of crimes against her went way back, a serial offender’s rap sheet.

But this humiliation was different. All her past mortifications suddenly skinned themselves and wrenched themselves inside out, as if also under his firm unquestioning command. Their wet insides reeked of a deep, raw gratification, deep beyond the reach of logic’s law.

Poetic couplets locked together in her mind as she unzipped her hoodie in disassociated languor.

_Poke the wound of where I was shamed  
and rejected  
and ground into dust.  
The pus that leaks out is pure nectar._

Heroin streaks of arousal shot through her as she shrugged out of her hoodie’s sleeves, arousal from the mouth of the same degredation when he’d pissed on her: so debased, so helpless under the stream of urine coursing out of his exquisite cock, spattering on you, befouling you, staining and unmasking you as the slut who actually _likes_ this, a debasement so monstrous you could only sink under its vile weight, let it crush you and spasm you into delighted smithereens.

_The chaotic, knotted wrong side of a tapestry  
is always more intriguing than the front. _

She tucked her hands under the hem of her shirt in the same numb haze she’d felt the first day she’d stroked herself for his delectation and lifted, slowly –

_the surreal electric now_

He watched her with measured eyes.

“Kurosawa and Mifune did sixteen films together,” he said, calmly, “and then in 1965 . . .”

He slashed the air with his flat hand.

_Never mind._

A cascade of relief flooded her. He wasn’t going to humiliate her in class. He had too much mercy for that. He just wanted to poke where she hurt, to see what wobbled, probe if there was something there to use on her later. And those hand signals. _To check if I remembered_ , she suddenly realized, _if I’d been listening_. Yes, of course she’d been listening. _Always, Daddy._

She lowered the hem of her shirt and slid back in her seat. Just another attentive freshman, pulse slowly retreating to normal.

He said nothing, eyes locked for one knotted moment. She wasn’t sure, but in his face she read the same relief, mirrored back to her. _Between Sunday and Wednesday is a gap long enough to make a first time into a one-night stand._ Fretting over that gap had torn her up with worry. She was so enthralled to Daddy’s power it never occurred to her . . .

_. . . that he could worry about that, too_

“We’re going to watch Kurosawa’s _Yojimbo_. It’s a 1961 samurai action drama starring Mifune.” He pulled out his phone and discreetly tapped at it before sliding it back into his pocket. “But before we do, I’d like to touch on the visual language of Japanese cinema. Kurosawa is the most accessible to Western audiences because his style – his _mise en scene_ , if you remember your vocabulary -- is the most similar to Hollywood filmmaking. So in contrast, let’s look at some clips from the films of Yasujiro Ozu, whom some would argue is the _most_ Japanese filmmaker.”

Somewhere in the room the trapped insect _bzzzz bzzzz bzzzz_ of a vibrating cell phone broke the calm.

“Someone has their phone on?” He looked up, irritated. “Silence it, please.”

A shuffle of activity undulated through the theater as students fumbled through bags and purses and pockets, lifting the cracked black screens of their innocently silent phones. Rey didn’t have a phone. She waited patiently as the _bzzzz bzzzz bzzzz_ kept boring an insistent hole in the silence. She shifted in her seat and nudged the toe of her sneaker to her bookbag

and felt with horror the vibration tickle into her foot

_Oh no_

The domino cascade of what she’d failed to do clattered into cold revelation even before she found the thing in the bottom of her bookbag. Right where it had dumped out by accident when she’d upended the lunch bag the first time, buzzing like an irate bee in a jar. She closed her fingers around the c-shaped, lumped loop of velvety silicone. Its vibration burned her hand. She squinted her eyes tight, knowing she didn’t want to read the sticky note she knew her fingers would find if she searched further – _goddammit_ , the same square capital handwriting, so much to read between the lines in its two words --

BEFORE CLASS

Ok, so she hadn’t done her homework.

She pressed her fingertips to the frantic furrow between her brow, hiding behind the theater curtains of her hands like a kid who thinks they won’t be found if they can’t see you.

He knew.

She wasn’t even going to look.

She quickly snatched up the new toy. She saw now its velvety skin was an eye-stunning magenta that burned her retinas in the dark of the theater, as lurid as her shame. She shoved it into her jeans pocket. If she ran to the bathroom now she could salvage the situation. She stood up –

“Excuse me.” His curt voice cutting through the silence. “It’s not break time yet.”

He didn’t have to punish her with the ice in his gaze. The thousand cuts of everyone turning around to see who was fucking up did it for him. A hot flash of embarrassment seared her cheeks. It hurt to blush in public almost as much as undressing might have. The shrapnel of someone’s snort of amusement lodged in her heart as she choked down a gulp and sunk into her seat.

He slipped the phone out of his pocket and tapped the screen.

The buzz in her hip pocket stopped.

She didn’t see any of _Yojimbo_. The grunts and slashes and musical growl of Mifune’s Japanese penetrated her ears but her eyes stayed screwed shut tight. It was coming. She was going to pay for this. If she kept her eyes shut enough maybe the truth couldn’t find her. She shrugged blindly back into her hoodie and sunk into its cowl like a turtle, as if it could protect her.

Then the tender skin of her closed eyelids glowed the shade of a blood orange’s pulp and she knew the house lights were on again.

“Write up your observations about Japanese mise-en-scene.” The rustle of bookbags and jackets, the squeal of theater seats _flap-flap_ ping back to vertical. “See you next Wednesday.”

She gulped. Ready and not ready for her penalty.

She opened her eyes, knowing who would meet her gaze.

And he did.

Nobody enraptured by their cell phones and next destination noticed how he stood leaning against the stage, arms crossed, little flicker of muscle in his jaw.

Eyes boring into her.

He gave the tiniest flick of a look up over her head, to the back of the theater. Where the projection booth was. And returned his meaningful glare into her eyes. It penetrated the back of her skull like a bullet.

Rey stayed in her seat, breath so shallow it felt like an asthma attack. Whatever fun there was in being humiliated was gone. This was not fun at all. It hurt with fear and shame and guilt and she tried to fill her constricted lungs one inhale at a time until the last classmate had left and it was just her and him

and she got up without being told and slunk up the stairs, teeth trembling.

She could feel the heat of him ten steps behind her. Her fingers almost wouldn’t close around the door handle.

She went in. The mountainous weave of black foam soundproofing blanketing every wall made her heart sink.

His body filled the doorway more impenetrably than any door could. He still closed it _clik_ behind him. And did the lock.

He dropped his hand to his side and bent the V of two fingers like a pitcher throwing a knuckleball. She could figure that one out without being told.

_Kneel._

She did.

“Tell me about your homework,” he commanded in that cello baritone. From her low vantage he was the size of the adults she’d remembered fearing her entire childhood.

“I turned in my paper --” she began.

“I read it. You phoned it in. B plus. What else? You went shopping.”

She nodded silently. His glare jogged her correct protocol.

“Yes.”

He spun his finger in a circle. “Let’s see.”

She unzipped her hoodie to reveal the striped shirt she was so proud of this morning. _Was that enough?_ He kept staring at her. She swallowed hard and peeled the shirt off her torso. His stare didn’t budge. _All the way, then._ She struggled out of the elastic of her sports bra, her nipples pebbling in spite of herself. He yanked the bra violently out of her hands.

“This is fucking hideous,” he threatened, shaking it at her. “If someone gives you a chance to buy something your body actually deserves, I suggest you take it. And you’re done with this.” He scooped up her hoodie from the floor and threw both garments on the projection table with disgusted force.

 _My hoodie._ She snatched her hands out for it before she could squelch the pathetically childish reflex. She clasped her hands against her chest and willed them to behave, her fingers worrying a nervous invisible rosary between them. _Hail Mary, Mother of God, please restore my second skin._ She screwed her eyes tight, afraid. This is where they tore into her, when they knew what she wanted, when they knew the things that protected her. Dolls and character-printed plastic plates and boxes of ribbons. Capricious presents from foster parents trying to curry favor with the new girl, getting fed up with her, throwing the “gifts” away in petty cruelty, refusing under one pretense after another to let her pack them into the garbage bag she’d carry from one house to the next. Even the smallest things – rock collections, pinecones, shells from one rare trip to the beach. And now he knew this weakness, her underbelly, her most vulnerable childish self. It would make him tear into her. It was an ugly hoodie. She didn’t want it. It was the worst pea soup color and its wrists were frayed and its zipper stuck and it was the equivalent of how a fawn’s coat is dappled in sun-shaded camouflage, so that the predators cannot find you.

And here she was, kneeling and stripped, before the biggest predator of all. A man who could crush her on every level, physically, emotionally, spiritually. He could fail her. He held the power of a guillotine blade of a report card F. Shave points off that 4.0 and give the school no reason to shelter her anymore. Pack the memory of their one good night in a garbage bag and enter a shapeless future. She felt she was kneeling before a God who hated her.

_He hates me._

Something unguarded in his slowing breath opened her eyes.

The look on his face . . .

Not pity. Not cruelty. But the curtain of his dominance dropped, just for one wounded moment. A speck of heartbreak, in an ocean of disappointment.

“And you ignored your other homework,” he said.

“No,” she protested. “I – the glass one. I _did_ it. I did what you asked. It felt . . . _amazing_ , Daddy. It felt so fucking good. I wished it was your cock inside me.” Speaking the truth out loud to him made her cunt flutter and gush even as frustrated tears percolated in the corners of her eyes. “I _didn’t_ forget.”

“Are you talking back to me?” he said, softly.

She was quiet.

“Everyone heard what you forgot,” he said.

The fresh sting of that recent humiliation made her cheeks burn all over again. Knowing he was deliberately poking her where it hurt made her tremble for what might come next.

He blinked hard and crossed his arms and searched the corners of the room for an answer. It was slow to come.

“I chose it because you would like it . . .” he finally began.

And then couldn’t finish the sentence.

The balance flipped. She saw both sides of their pact’s delicate equation. A toy that’s zero decibels inside her plush folds and a rude _bzz bzz_ outside it. A classmate with a social justice axe to grind notices the magenta flash in Rey’s hand, connects the dots about why Prof’s tapping his phone from the stage. Blabs to a friend. Blabs to a teacher. Blabs to social media.

 _He’s got a house_ , she realized. _He’s got a job. He’s got an unblemished name._

_He’s got a son._

Mutually assured destruction.

 _Little Miss #MeToo doesn’t know the whole story_ , she thought angrily. _And she’ll never understand it, never_ want _to understand it._ _But that wouldn’t change the narrative from the outside._

_Our narrative._

_Our._

Suddenly she saw what was at stake. She saw his dominance wasn’t just a yoke over her shoulders. It was a bouquet, a ring, a path. All she needed to do was grab it full force and hold onto it, white-knuckled, with her badly burned hands. Unquestioning. Obedient. Trusting.

Impossible.

It hurts to be your own worst enemy. Hurts more when it hurts someone else.

_Total surrender._

_Why can’t I?_

_What’s it going to take?_

“What kind did you get?” he asked.

She blinked, untranced, totally befuddled. “What kind of what?”

“At the health clinic. What kind of birth control.”

Another haiku knitted itself together on her tongue, this time only two syllables:

_Oh_

_shit_

The look in his eyes . . .

Rey remembered a news video of a dying sycamore struck dead center by lightning. Its leaves and bark were still sap-filled and green as the inferno in its core patiently devoured it from the inside out with the heat of a thousand suns.

“You know what happens to little girls who talk back,” he said,

and turned out the lights.


	14. Chapter 14

The darkness.

Projection booths are light-tight. Echoes die on the insulation. Only the soft hiss of the ventilator shaft and the sting of her kneecaps against the carpeted floor rooted Rey inside the booth’s warm void.

She choked out an apology. “I’m sorry, Daddy.” What a stupid futile thing to say. But she did mean it. It wasn’t just a panicked attempt to blunt the punishment she knew was coming. A week ago today he was washing her hair and coaxing orgasms out of her and offering an agreement to be his Slut Princess. In return she’d angered him with her incompetence and cowardice. It _was_ cowardice. She could have tried on the vintage bra offered to her, could have thought a little harder about that paper, could have dug a little deeper in that paper bag, could have remembered that going to student health was an order, not a request.

Could have declared in word and body and action how much she wanted this, instead of flinching against her past.

None were impossible tasks. They would have pleased him.

They would have been her truth.

And now her pound of flesh . . .

What did he say that unhurried morning in bed? _I’m your Daddy. I reserve the right to sometimes give the carrot and sometimes give the stick._ And she’d said _I don’t want the stick,_ and he’d answered _Keep being a good girl and you won’t have to worry about it._

Time to worry.

“You’re not done undressing.” His voice came from nowhere in the stygian void, faceless narrator of her debasement. The absolute calm in his words made her nauseous with arousal.

 _Daddy didn’t say to stand up._ It’s impossible to strip out of jeans with any dignity while still on your knees. Dignity was not on the menu. She looped her thumbs into the dual waistbands of jeans and panties and struggled them below the obstacle of her buttocks before skinning the denim out from underneath each leg. The floor’s berber carpet scuffed rug burns on her knees. She could not see him but could feel the sinister corona of his presence in every erect hair on her skin.

The thrum of apprehension in her heart wasn’t a pure sustained note of only dread. There was, to her surprise, relief washing under it, too – the karmic succor of knowing you had it coming. It was so easy to let someone else do the punishing for you, relieve yourself of the endless onus of self-reproach. It balanced the scales, took the sin out of her hands. No pain of her penance could outweigh the comfort of knowing the world was not, in fact, cruel and capricious. That under Daddy’s hands there was such a thing as rightness, balance, a satisfying clockwork order to action and consequence. That punishment was certain but not infinite, and its end was the beginning of a purifying forgiveness. The sweetness of just desserts.

Being naked in absolute darkness was like skinnydipping in blood-warm water. Its engulfment felt good. The cool vertical strip of wet tracing along the faultline of her labia agreed. She was kicking off the heels of her sneakers when she felt him move very close to her. The burred growl of his zipper undoing sliced through the silence like a paper cut on night’s tongue.

His thumb pulled her lower lip down roughly. She opened her mouth in compliance and felt something round and spongy fill her mouth

a slit in it

_oh_

“We left things badly last time,” he whispered. She could feel the soft ridge of his foreskin glove against her lips. She’d never played with it soft before. Without thinking she lipped at it, curiously, ran the flat of her tongue against the slit at the tip –

\-- and got a slap on the cheek for her boldness. “Don’t you dare get me hard,” he hissed, but the way the tip bobbed up away from her mouth told her it was too late. He clamped her jaw in his hands and pulled her up to his cock and she could feel him bend his knees to get the whole tip in her mouth. It locked in behind her lips by the sheathed corona ridge and she felt the trickle on her tongue almost instantly. It was salty and pungent and awful in her mouth and she did not like it

_and that was entirely the point_

_and the point was delicious_

She _mmmphed_ in reflex.

“Smart mouth. Swallow.” Either that or choke, drown, sputter. She did her best and gulped in hurried panic. His piss sat like a sour rock in her stomach. No thirst quenched here. Some still spilled helplessly from the lax corners of her mouth and ran down her chin and throat and nipples in rank rivulets. She shuddered involuntarily, the animal recoil of bitter medicine.

He was a big man. _Oh please stop._

“Don’t make the next person who walks in here smell this on the carpet,” he warned. Something breathless and narcotic in his voice made her tighten her pucker. She swiped the rivulets off her skin with the soft undersides of her wrists, like how you test a perfume. “Every drop.” This was a sacred space. Do not despoil a projection booth. Magic is cast here.

_This is its own kind of magic_

He was slowing, not from running out but from slowly hardening. New length let her sink back on her heels a little, thrill to how the tender tip grew hard in her mouth, unsleeved from his foreskin as she knew it. She held her quivering tongue back with tremendous effort. The Pavlovian memory reared up of what it was like to suck on him, lick him, find that gristly point of great pleasure under the skin and run her mouth up and down it . . .

He pulled out of her mouth with a wet pop.

The absence of the pleasure against her tongue made the discomfort in her sour stomach flare up. Her newly aroused self-worth stirred in protest inside her. Her stomach hurt. Her nostrils still flared trying to escape the gagging funk that still flowered saltily inside her mouth. But that blurted indignance was just a splash of vermouth in the otherwise very, very dry martini of her true desire.

Words burst out of her, as if uncorked.

“I never signed the contract,” she cried out, and instantly regretted it. The right words weren’t _I never._ The right words were _I didn’t get to. I didn’t get to let my slut cunt pledge my loyalty to you and your rules, Daddy. Your shitty ex-wife interrupted us with her manufactured emergency right as we were three licks from the center of the Tootsie Pop. I want to be your true official Slut Princess more than anything in the world. How good it would be to know I suffer precisely because I am yours. How awful to have my punishment float in a void now, unbound to the contract I so desperately want to sign for you, anything for you . . ._

_I do want this._

Another slap could fly at her from anywhere in the dark. She readied herself. Breathed deeply. Flinched again and again at the nothingness.

The slap never came.

Only his cool thoughtful exhale above her.

“You’re so right,” he purred.

In one swift move he tipped her into the void.

She panicked when he pushed hard on her shoulders. Before the back of her skull knocked against the floor his hand spanned the nape of her neck and lowered her down. His other hand didn’t waste time finding her cunt, splitting her labia, checking how wet she was like how a mechanic checks the oil.

Two fingers, long gentle middle and ring, deep inside her immediately. Thumb on her clit. _Uuhhhhh._ Rey gasped and sat up halfway, shocked at the zero-to-sixty he was performing inside her. His knuckles knocked against the soft meat of her cunt on each side. His big hand on her chest thrust her back to the floor with humiliating force. This time her skull did knock on the ground.

“You think I don’t throttle you back?” he said into her face, breath hot, voice rich with amused scorn. “I know what you’re capable of.”

Suddenly an orgasm with the fierce impersonal force of a hiccup overtook her and shook her with cramping velocity. She howled, wide-eyed, more in shock than pleasure. An X on the dotted line is as good as fine calligraphy.

_Signed._

He kept his fingers in her.

“You’re not done,” he said, and kissed her neck. His fingers slowed but didn’t stop. That chaste buss sent filigreed shivers cobwebbing over the thick dark brutal pleasures he was dragging out of her below.

“Tell me about the glass toy,” he purred in her ear. His fingers churned ravenously in and out of her. “The homework you _bothered_ to do.”

“You couldn’t --” she babbled before her sentence died in another coherence-blistering wave of pleasure. _You couldn’t do this if I hadn’t practiced so good all week, Daddy._ No way she could have taken his fingers so deeply, so immediately, so unthrottled if he hadn’t let her play. His glass surrogate had done its warm-up thoroughly

_for the big event_

but the rest of the sentence evaporated as her eyes rolled skyward into her skull

He slapped her cheek again.

“Couldn’t?” he intoned darkly.

He moved closer and whispered into her face.

“I can do _anything_ ,”

He lowered his head and dragged his tongue langurously around and over her clit until she squealed a low moan that died a blunt death on the soundproofed walls. A percolating flutter squeezed around his fingers for an instant. His own soft grunt meant he felt it, too.

 _Cathartic._ His fingers were thrumming now in bass guitarist finger strokes against the same spot that housed all her trauma. That pressurized glow was building in a ball of warm succulent light deep inside her again. The pleasure silenced her again. He didn’t punish her this time. Just kept stroking that spot until those purifying tears surged up again. Could he feel it? Could he palpate her trauma, just like how she could feel his own arousal in that secret nexus under his cock? Could they read each other’s hearts in the Braille of their bodies?

She didn’t have to speak it in words. The tears streaking down the side of her face like crystalline cat’s eye makeup said it for her. She felt the long ridge of his nose nuzzle the side of her face, sensing the tears he couldn’t see. His lips pressed up against her ear. She could feel the full length of his cock riding against her thigh, rigid as the femur underneath.

“Good girl.”

Suddenly he yanked his fingers out of her with unkind haste and twisted her hips with such force she flopped onto her stomach with a breathless yelp. His fingers dug into the pressure points ringing the butterfly wings of her pelvic bones. Escaping the pain automatically unfolded her up onto hands and knees, big hands clawing deep massages into her hips. He spat. A cool kiss of saliva landed squarely on her asshole. She stiffened as he rubbed his slickened thumb around and around its puckered surface as Rey petrified under the novel sensation.

“Do you know what I could be doing to you right now?” he whispered hoarsely. Tender regret floated in his voice. “If you had just listened?”

The firefly light of a cell phone blinked a cold blush onto the room’s shadows. Rey felt a _bzzz bzzz_ in the tangle of fabric at her ankle.

He reached down and extricated the toy from the pocket of her discarded jeans. His big hand held her firmly at the small of her back as he slipped it into her without any resistance or protest. Its lobed end popped gently into place behind the ridge of bone deep in her pussy. The rest of its c-curve clutched between her labia and spread its unlocalized sensations over everything between her legs. She’d never used a vibrating toy before. It was hummingly pleasant, thoughtfully formed, utterly inoffensive. She liked his fingers better.

He tapped on his phone’s screen and the buzz morphed into an undulating wave, advancing and retreating against the front and back walls. He leaned over her back in a near wrestling hold and whispered into the nape of her neck.

“Do you like this, kitten?”

Maybe he wanted her to like it. But this week, her truth had gone from acquaintance to friend. And she wasn’t going to betray a friend who’d been so good to her.

“Not really,” she said, easily.

She felt his touch relax, to her surprise. _Did the truth please him?_ It was the first time her truth had ever pleased someone else. The first time it mattered.

“Good girl.” His fingers tugged it out of her with a pop. What a relief. “Did you like the glass toy?” He was rubbing his entire hand against the slick and fleshy surface of her cunt, a blunt _all together now_ stimulation that made her knees quiver.

“Yes,” she exhaled.

“What did you like about it?” His two fingers found her insides again. This time instead of crooking them against her g-spot they plowed left and right, taking turns against the walls. The sensation was different – brighter, ticklier, sweeter. What was he finding inside her? Or, rather, what did he already know was there for her to discover? Thumb on her asshole this time. She could feel all her juice sliding down, a fat tickling bead of it hanging suspensfully from the tip of her clit. His warm fingers felt exquisite. They were so much more brutishly formed than her own delicate ones, long and dense and knobbed at the knuckles. A miniature of the way all of his solidly built body mocked the smooth childish grace of hers.

“I believed it was you,” she gasped.

Without asking permission she twisted around and grabbed him in possessed reflex, forced her mouth on his, locked herself onto him with her arms, undulated against him. The rough of his shirt scrubbed against her nipples as his bruising kisses returned the hunger. His fingers slipped out of her in the rush of movement but he found her cunt quickly again, in and out and in and out as she straddled his thick thighs and thrashed her hips. The desperate, sublimated way he speared his fingers into her made her realize even his self-restraint had a limit.

It would be madness to ask for the thing she really wanted. What they both really wanted. It was a madness full of irresponsible consequences and virginal apprehension.

The big ask was dancing deep in her throat.

Before lust overcame fear he grabbed a fistful of her hair and forced her down.

“Suck,” he commanded.

She remembered his whispered promise. _Next time will be in your mouth._

She realized that ultimatum had also been made to himself.

The swollen head of his cock slipped so easily into her mouth, as if it belonged there. It didn’t choke or gouge her throat. It filled it, like a treat. Her tongue swirled around and around his tightly swollen head as the stamp-sized muscles under her cheeks ached with the lockjaw of accomodating it. His fingers combed roughly through her hair, subtly, eagerly, bobbed her down. She liked the pressure on the back of her skull, the forcefulness with which each basketball push said _keep going, sugar_. She swirled her tongue up, over, around, every texture and ridge of him alive against the planes of her tongue. She dared herself to go gag-deep, play the head against the elastic back of her throat, test herself with how calm she could remain every time it cut off her airway for one tense moment. An unguarded _whoosh_ of his exhalation spoke volumes about her dedication to craft.

“I was afraid you didn’t want this,” he said softly as he stroked her hair. “I thought you’d changed your mind.”

The deeper meaning of her lapses this week dawned over her, the reasons he’d tested her from the stage with gestures that would have gone unnoticed if no one knew the code. This wasn’t a game to him, not any more than it was to her. And all the wasted anguished time she’d spent worrying alone this week, prematurely grieving what she’d feared would cool to nothingness in her absence . . . She saw now his cultivation of her, carnal and not, wasn’t just some sadistic hobby, some jaded distraction through the dark hinterlands of a especially mean mid-life crisis. The ocean depth of his devotion was adult-sized, Daddy-sized, bigger than any devotion she could imagine.

She looked up at him, eyes pleading. Even if she couldn’t see him in the dark she still poured everything she had into her own gaze.

“There’s nothing I’ve ever wanted more,” she said, her heart heavy with the magnitude of her carelessness.

His hand swept gently around her head. She intercepted it with her own small hand, pressed it to her cheek, kissed the soft hollow at the heart of his rough palm.

Sinking her mouth over him again said more than any declaration of love.

“I’m a fool to do this here,” he barely choked out. He was pushing the back of her head more forcefully now. She gladly doubled her efforts, took more of him down the smooth muscles of her throat. The concentration it took to slow her breath and not gag, to trust in Daddy, made hypnotic surrender wash over her. “But I just couldn’t wait to see you.”

The revelation in his words hit Rey with a shock.

_My rule that I can’t touch myself. . ._

_. . . he’s following it, too_

“Things are changing fast,” he said. She listened, mouth still busy over him. “Just know how much I want you. Just keep being good. Can you wait?”

She lifted her mouth. “Yes, Daddy. Anything.”

A soft exhale of relief from him.

The only sound in the airtight booth was the wet contact of her soft mouth on him. The sensory deprivation of the dark plus the constant thrum of texture against her tongue and lips and teeth and palate lifted her into an altered state. Her tongue thrashed in easy, familiar curls around the head and found slippery purchase in the ridge’s underside, its shape funneling her tongue to drag flat against the veined underside in great slurping strokes. She wound her fist around the base of his cock and when she stroked its suede up and down and stretched it tight to lick that spot she worked a strained _ohhh . . ._ out from his throat. The bass vibration of his moan cut through her like ultrasound and settled in her clit.

A green apple wash of total crush delight spiraled up in her. Laboring over her Daddy’s spit-slick cock, feeling it choke and tantalize her mouth in turns, stroking the blood-warm shaft of it as much as her slutty little hands wanted . . . this was an extraordinary happiness. No more playing the shy virgin. Even if she was. No more. The slut princess ascendant. Triumphant. Daddy’s little girl.

_Goodbye, Rey._

“Let me sign the agreement,” he whispered.

What would have before made her clench up in apprehension only made her tighten her grip. _Mouth, tongue, throat, palm. All at Daddy’s absolute disposal. I fear nothing._ She rubbed her thumb hard in the groove along the main shaft and lathered her tongue against that sweetest spot, spearing that sacred point, making her mouth as soft and wet and tight and pleasureable as she could, the loveliest cave to spill an orgasm into. His grip around her hair tightened to real, savage, reflexive pulling and its sting felt so sweet

concrete tightening under her lips

_this is it_

The promise spurted up against her soft palate in kiss bursts. Alive. His groan consecrated the projection booth. _Film is truth twenty-four frames a second._

She swallowed without being asked. It coated her throat like chocolate.

She crawled up his torso to kiss him, not caring a bit if he could taste his own cum. He didn’t care. He read the invitation of her spread thighs kneeling across his lap correctly and worked his fingers gratefully into her sore and hungry pussy again. Their kisses had a week’s worth of absence healed in them.

“Please take me home with you,” she pleaded.

He shook his head. “My son’s with me. Tonight and Thursday. But I want to see you Friday.  
I got you the toy so you could know I was thinking about you. But if you don’t like it . . .”

She finished the thought with a shake of her head. “I don’t want a phone. I can wait for you.”

The thick _shluck_ of his fingers working her raw. “Be patient,” he whispered in her ear as she choked soft mewls in time to the unspairing things he was doing to her. “Things are changing. Faster than you know.” He placed the meat of his thumb on her clit and she screwed up her face in shivering, incredulous agony. “Faster . . .

than . . .

you . . .

know . . .”

Her cry was sharp and animal and serrated with catharsis.

He held her in her jellied, beaten state until the world returned behind her eyes.

 _Usually knowing you’re nothing kills by inches,_ she thought _, carves into your bones. This is the other edge of that suffering – to be so small, so helpless, utterly obliterated, that you crush down to a grave pinpoint, a dead star, and in that imploded state find all the mercy you’ve ever craved. To have someone dredge all that worthlessness out of you and spin it into gold in his strong hands._ The analgesic of her Daddy’s unstinting love hugged her as tightly as the dark as he did.

“Stay here for five minutes,” he whispered into her neck. “We can’t be seen together.”

She nodded, wiped tears, slid off of his lap. The tree of him rose above her and zipped up. The click of the doorknob.

“Friday,” he whispered, before closing the door behind him.

The dark, alone.

_The virgin is dead. Long live the Slut Princess._

_Long live Daddy._  
  
Five carefully counted minutes later Rey dressed in what clothes he’d left her – no bra, no hoodie – and exited the booth into the only marginally brighter theater. She kept her arms instinctively crossed over where her nipples poked at her shirt as she walked down the auditorium steps to the seat where she’d left her bag. _Where was it?_ She grimaced anticipating how cold the walk outside would be without a hoodie. Maybe that was intended, one last slap on the wrist from Daddy. _My bag has to be here_ , she thought impatiently. _I didn’t move it_.

She hadn’t. It was exactly under the seat where she’d left it. Right underneath the scarf, the gloves, and the chic, brass-buttoned peacoat.


	15. Chapter 15

Rey ran, truly _ran_ , arms crossed over her unbound breasts, all the way to the cheap-chic superstore seven blocks outside the student center. _What size am I_? she fretted under the aggressively white florescent lights as she screeched bra hangers across the metal rack. A 34C swam over her in the dressing room. A 30A banded her chest as tightly as the sports bra he’d disabused her of an hour ago. The mint green 32B fit well, even if the cups still gapped a little. But that color. Rey scrunched up her nose. _You can do better than that, girl._

Fifteen minutes later she was at the checkout with three acceptably fitting bras in her hand: nude, black, sherbet pink. Not white. White is for virgins. She got matching panties even though he hadn’t ordered her to. _Something your body deserves._

Ten seconds of walking back to campus with her breasts firmly ensconsed inside a real bra’s lacey cups sold her completely on why Daddy had lost his shit over her still clinging to that ugly, stretched out, rag-grey excuse of a garment. Her breasts finally felt supported, as if cupped by hands, and the faint scratch of the lace was a mildly stimulating reminder of their hidden prettiness. _This is so much better._ The snug hug of the band around her ribs matched the still-pleasant ache in her cunt that thudded with every step. The peacoat hugged her too. The scarf, the gloves – at last, warm in January for the first time in years. It felt wonderful covered by his care.

Someone hustled by her with a go-cup of Starbucks and the fleeting vapor of coffee made ten thousand watts of happiness surge in her. It felt wonderful to have this giddy, nameless euphoria tickle the edges of everything.

Maybe it wasn’t so nameless after all.

Maybe its name is four letters and very easy.

Student health could see her that day, too. She exited with a month’s worth of the pill, a rattling candy horseshoe of next steps. The medic who saw her also wrote out a scrip for a dental check-up, something she hadn’t had in years. She realized now that Daddy’s demand to visit student health wasn’t just about getting her fuck-ready. It was about his correct suspicion that she was behind in routine medical care: dentist, physical, pelvic exam. That one was a first, too. “This may feel a little uncomfortable,” the medic warned as she scooted Rey forward in the stirrups. Rey just smiled a canary-eating smile to herself and took a mere speculum like a pro.

Back in her dorm bathroom she swallowed the first pill. _Am I supposed to feel different?_ she thought to her reflection. Alice in the looking glass. _Drink me. Eat me._

A tinny _brrrrring_ buzzed, way down the dorm hall. It sounded like a Chihuahua-sized fire alarm.

 _What the hell is that?_ , Rey thought, and then remembered she’d put the dorm’s ancient pay phone’s number on her job application.

She scrambled out of the bathroom and snagged the hefty black reciever on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this Rey?” The sound coming from the phone’s earpiece was scarred and crackly with electronic neglect. “This is Mark, the manager at the Bijou. Can you come in for training tomorrow?”

“Absolutely,” she said with delight.

“Bring photo ID and your own uniform,” he said. “Black dress pants, black button-down shirt, black comfortable shoes. We’ll supply a nametag. See you at three.” _Click._

 _Wow_. Rey shook her head in pleased disbelief. _They actually called_. And now she had a job. But she wasn’t going to let the sun go down on her film class assignment. She’d learned her lesson: _Don’t toy with Daddy._ She hung up the phone and raced back to her room to pack for a library visit.

Joy the librarian was thrilled to rustle up every Japanese movie she could uncover for Rey. _Yojimbo_ , finally, but also _Woman In The Dunes, Funeral Parade of Roses, The Life of Oharu, Tokyo Story, In The Realm of the Senses, Branded to Kill, Ghost in the Shell, Supermarket Woman, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, The Eternal Breasts, Audition, Spirited Away, My Little Sister_ , even _Gojira_ , until Joy appeared ruefully at the screening room door and had to let her know the library was closing at midnight. Maybe Joy had slyly curated her towards films about women’s lives, but that was all Rey could think about on the brisk walk home in the dark. Her thoughts pounded out in the harsh relief marks of typewriter keys on paper.

**_It’s not possible to dissect Japanese movies without enumerating its unusual vocabulary of recurring themes and idiosyncratic_ mis en scene _that brands its results apart not only from Asian but world cinema. The details are subtle, yet indelible. It takes careful close reading to notice how the standardized camera height is often not at the six-foot eye level of a standing adult, as it is in Western movies, but is instead at three feet, approximating the eyeline of someone kneeling on a tatami mat. This changes the perspective of a room’s familiar planes into something that envelops its inhabitants in the heart of a space – and into its corresponding, ensconsing protocols and manners. There are also “pillow shots” (as named by critic No_** **_ël Burch): still vignettes of a setting or landscape, inserted between scenes and lingering a pointed five or six seconds, that serve no narrative meaning in the Western sense. Instead, they’re a meditative place to rest your emotions for a moment, like a pillow._ **

**_And there’s Japanese cinema’s many dialectic contradictions. Its reverence for silence and the unspoken teases against an equally fervent celebration of outrageous sensation and spectacle. Its fixation on artifice and technology exists against a visceral kinship with nature. And despite the tremendous institutional sexism of Japanese society, its cinema bleeds with empathy for women’s constrained, stunted, and painful lives._ **

**_Maybe that’s merely the stuff of great drama: after all, if a cinema savors – and excels at – tragedy and bitter irony, as Japanese cinema does, then women’s lives are the motherload, no pun intended. But it’s more than just how Japanese society’s deeply proscribed rules of conduct are always the spoken or unspoken antagonist in every movie, an everywhere-and-nowhere force as ubiquitous as the bestiary of_ kami _– Shinto spirits – that occupy all things. Cinema is the one place in Japanese society where the interior lives of women are laid bare and voiced in a way unprecedented anywhere in the culture, whether it’s the life of a young girl (_ Spirited Away _), a marginalized middle-aged woman (_ Supermarket Woman _), an objectified marriage prospect (_ Audition _), a dying poet (_ The Eternal Breasts _), a dehumanized cyborg (_ Ghost in the Shell _), an enslaved wife (_ Woman in the Dunes _), an unmoored widow (_ When a Woman Ascends The Stairs _), a defiant sex outlaw (_ In The Realm of the Senses _), four sisters finding their truths (_ My Little Sister _), and even transgendered women (_ Funeral Parade of Roses _). While women in Japan may not have gained voting rights until 1947 and still suffer institutionalized sexual harassment, professional ostracization, and crippling family obligations, the honor and legitimacy paid to their stories in their nation’s cinema puts all other cinemas to shame._**

_Now that’s not phoning it in_, Rey thought with satisfaction as she collapsed into bed. Her sleep was saturated with contentment.

Dawn was gentle and welcome. Grooming this morning was a pleasure. Shower, shampoo, new satiny underwear. She combed her damp hair carefully into its usual ponytail and noticed with some pleasure that she _had_ grown it just a little longer, just like Daddy had asked her to.

All the yawns left over from her late bedtime got shaved off at breakfast with a celebratory coffee. She made it blacker this time, with just a dollop of milk and sugar to cushion her stomach. Coffee didn’t need its flavor blunted anymore. In its concentrated essence she recognized the loamy, spicy underscent in his skin and kisses and cum. Revelation made her lick her lips.

Striding into All Dolled Up Vintage with a wad of $200 nestled comfortably in her peacoat’s breast pocket wasn’t difficult, either. Today the record player near the cash register scratched out Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s yelps and whoops, but the same brassy matron who’d helped Rey last time was still parked behind the counter.

“I’d like to see black pants and black shirts, please,” Rey said, this time without trepidation.

“What era, honey?”

The question threw her. “I don’t know.” She looked around and realized for the first time how the store wasn’t just a jumbled riot of kooky noise and color. There were clear cordoned sections, where the clothes of a single decade could gossip among themselves in cocktail party clusters, in their shared language. She could almost hear their conversations. The clothes of the 1930s were fragile yet swank, as if delicately hungover on expensive gin. The 1940s were grim and wide-shouldered, all business. The ’50s petticoats and prom dresses frothed a pastel sea foam of exalted femininity. The urbane mod color blocks of the ‘60s raised sharp eyebrows at interlopers and threatened to suck them down eye-burning paisley wormholes. The ‘70s were an endless rough meadow of scratchy burlaps and denims and vulgar polyesters. The zippered and neon and asymmetrical ‘80s buzzed with overstimulated hauteur. Posh _Clueless_ suits crowded in with stonewashed denim overalls in the ’90s. Pieces from the aughts onward loitered anxiously on one meager rack, like pre-teens out of their depth at a college party.

 _What party do I want to join?_ thought Rey. Not the ’50s. Something about the pithed, perfunctory ladylike-ness of the shirtwaist dress she’d tried on last time turned her off it, permanently. No decadence in that. No sass. No romance. _Pre-Code movies. Gold Diggers of 1933._ She savored the heft of the bills tucked close to her heart. _We’re in the money._

“1930s,” she said.

“That’s a good era for you, honey.” The woman struggled herself out from behind the counter. “You gotta have little hips and boobies. Not trying to dig in,” she said, lifting her hands in an apologetic shrug. “The clothes will fit you, is what I’m saying.” She stripped through the racks with such no-nonsense frankness, bloodhounding out the exact garment she was thinking of, that Rey realized she must be the store’s owner. No one else could keep that kind of mental inventory of what was on these infinite racks.

“Here we go.” The owner triumphantly swept up a jet-black backless blouse with long puffed bishop sleeves. When she twirled it front to back on its hanger the shiny charmeuse satin swirled as if it was underwater. “This is a Schiparelli knock-off, but it’s well-made. You could wear this to the Oscars, no one would know the difference.”

“It’s beautiful. But I can’t wear something backless to work.”

“What are you, at the theater?”

“Yeah.”

SHe shook her head. “Not a lot of work oxfords in the ’30s, honey. They’ll let you do a pinstripe? No? Okay.” She hustled over to the aughts reject rack and pulled out an unremarkable women’s fitted black button-down, the uninspiring kind big-box stores churn out as a household staple no different than flour or bleach. It wouldn’t fall apart at work, but Rey couldn’t hide her distaste.

The owner read her sentiment loud and clear. “You’re just gonna get popcorn on it,” she scolded. “You don’t have to get _married_ in it. Why’d you say the 1930s?”

“I just like the way the Thirties look.”

“Well, let’s put a pant with it.” She walked briskly over to the ’70s section. “You’re gonna do better with a Deco revival piece. It’s polyester, it’s gonna hold up, and you won’t have to dry clean it.” She zipped through a rack of bell bottoms and excavated out a pair of high-button sailor pants. The two columns of oversized black buttons striping its belly made it look like something Mickey Mouse would wear to a funeral. “Give these a try.”

Five minutes later in the dressing room Rey vowed to never doubt the owner again. The sailor pants hugged her hips perfectly and their swishing wide legs made her feel like Marlene Dietrich on an Alps vacation. The shirt lost all its utilitarian ugliness once she tucked it in deep and spread the collar open across her shoulders. Looking at her reflection gave her a sudden impulse. She snapped the elastic off her ponytail and shook her hair loose, parting it on one side like Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis. Her stick-straight hair didn’t cluster in curls in the back like theirs, but the sudden sophistication of how it looked tucked smartly behind her ears gave her astonished pause. _Why haven’t I always worn it like this?_ she thought.

And then: _I look pretty._

Her trust was absolute now. The owner placed a cushy pair of platform Mary Janes in her hands and Rey didn’t even have to slip her feet into the buttery leather to know they were replacing her ratty old sneakers for good. “What’s your favorite flower, honey?” the owner asked as she picked through an enormous tray strewn with a thick strata of loose costume jewelry.

Rey thought. A sunny flicker of a memory came back to her, of a foster children’s picnic at a nature preserve, and the endless, thickly-thatched golden meadow where the wildflowers grew to her eye level and stung her nose with their carroty, pungent perfume. She’d crouched in the straw and watched a field mouse snuggle its little nutmeg body into the forest of their woody stalks. Two little animals safe in the same ocean of blooms. 

“Queen Anne’s lace,” she said. “And daisies.”

The owner pulled a golden licorice whip of a necklace out from the pile. Three clusters of cream-enameled daisies hung at the bottom of a collarbone-skimming choker, their plush pollen cushion centers winking with flecks of amber rhinestones. “I don’t know if they’ll let you wear it at work, but it looks cute.”

Rey smiled broadly. “It does.”

She bought it. She bought everything. She wore it all out the door, feeling like a million bucks. A girl on the way to her first day of work, sunshine at her back. _Maybe Galaxie will be at the theater today_ , she thought as the forgiving rubber soles of her Mary Janes kissed the pavement with grown-up verve, in a way her sneakers never could. _Maybe I’ll taste a new flavor of chocolate. Maybe I’ll sweep up popcorn and take out trash. I don’t care what I do while I’m there._

_I’ll be at the movies._

_That’s all that matters._

There was a different ticket seller behind the glass. “I’m here to see Mark?” Rey asked. “I’m starting today.” Boy, that felt good to say. The kid in the booth nodded and let her pass.

Galaxie was behind the concession counter, crocheting something kaleidoscopic out of a ball of rainbow yarn. Rey walked up to her proudly.

“They called me,” she beamed.

“Hey!” said Galaxie happily. She offered up her palm for a high five. When Rey clapped it in triumph she realized that was the first time she’d touched a friend in a long time.

Galaxie put down her crocheting and reached under the counter for a secret button. _Bzzzz-clunk_. The concession stand door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY unlocked. “Come on in.”

The door opened wide, but Rey had to dance in a little circle in the tight vestibule to close it behind her. The concession stand that looked so reasonably spaced from the customer’s perspective was in reality a submarine-narrow corridor jammed with glistening food service machines. An industrial coffee maker gurgled and hissed the next hour’s brew. Sizzling bratwurst spun like indolent, greasy sunbathers on the chrome rollers of the hot dog cooker. And of course the big glass aquarium of the popcorn popper. It took up half the back wall and wafted its buttery siren song out over the entire lobby.

“Popcorn, coffee, and soda are free,” said Moxie, reading her thoughts. “Everything else is half price for employees.” She dipped a plain paper cup into the popper and handed it to her. “Just use one of these for what you want. We keep inventory by counting the real popcorn bags and soda cups.” Rey jostled a handful of the popcorn into her mouth. The giddy sense memory of the first time she’d had popcorn here, and who’d given it to her, rushed over her in a buttery tingle.

The door to the adjacent office opened and a harried sheepdog of a man walked in holding a clipboard. “Rey?” She nodded and he smiled warmly. “I’m Mark. Come on in.”

Thus began her first perfunctory hour as a new hire: W2 forms, IDs, signed codes of conduct, mandatory screenings of safety videos in which mulleted men in stonewashed jeans slipped theatrically in tragically unattended puddles of cola. She could hear the murmur and shuffle of crowds rolling out from the first matinee over the video’s peppy sythesizer score. _This is the rhythms of this place_ , she thought, and mused about all the movie theaters in the world following this private clockwork by the conscience of their own sunrise and sunsets. The timetable of showtimes was this world’s orrery, the ebb and flow of films premiering and closing following a rhythm like the birth and death of forests. The cinema cathedral and its eternal vespers.

She toured the projection booth. Galaxie had been honest about the theater’s projection capabilities: 16, 35, and 70mm. The projectors towered benevolently over her in the dark and heat of the long corridor that stabled them, one to a screen, and when she reverently placed her fingertips against their gunmetal hulls she could feel their warmth, like the warmth of a living being. Illuminated dust sprayed up in every crack where light met the air, as if they were sparks thrown up by the fairies.

 _I want to be here_ , Rey thought.

Mark looked at his watch. “Theater B hits end credits in five minutes. Think you’re ready to give sweeping up a try?”

Rey nodded. “Yes.”

Five minutes later Rey stood ready with broom and dustpan outside theater B. The movie’s muffled audio sounded through the wall she leaned on, its resonance stroking her back. She suddenly remembered a painting: _New York Movie_ , Edward Hopper. A blonde usherette, lost in dreams under the dim spotlight of a hallway wall sconce, waiting for a movie to end in 1939 just as Rey waited now, the next generation of vestal virgin sweeping popcorn from the temple. She ducked her head in conscious imitation of that painting, just to touch that woman’s hand, take the baton, step into the future.

The theater doors opened. Rey stepped back and let the herd clear out. No point in being overeager. Be pleasant, be welcoming. “Goodbye,” she smiled to anyone who made eye contact. Quite a few did, and smiled back. “Have a nice night. Goodbye. Goodb --”

Rey’s voice snapped out in her throat when she recognized the outline of those shoulders in the crowd. The fedora. The glasses. The cup of coffee. That unmistakable, heart-catching profile.

 _Daddy._ Her eyes went wide.

His did, too, when he saw her, so sharp in her new uniform, so eager and upright, thinking only of work and her new place as cinema’s vestal virgin, throat ringed with gold and flowers, and now this unexpected lagniappe --

And then Rey noticed . . .

he wasn’t alone.


	16. Chapter 16

The boy stepped out from behind him in the crowd. His son, unmistakably. Same long straight nose, same sloped _v_ of a jaw. But his shaggy auburn hair shone with a ruddy other-ness, the stamp of someone else’s pedigree. His face was leaner and his features clumsier than the baby-cheeked photo Rey remembered from Daddy’s desk. He must be straddling that rocket-powered cusp of puberty, that liminal, pubescent space where portraits and pants hems become obsolete every three months. The beatific child she’d vaguely imagined as part of Daddy’s life beyond her was, in reality, a gawky, pigeon-toed teen, artlessly slurping the last of a soda.

 _I don’t even know his name,_ she thought. The boy slouched from the shoulders, the way tall kids do when they’re self-conscious of their height. _The way Daddy might have, once upon a time._

The next thought barrelled in with sobering precision. 

_If he’s twelve, or thirteen . . ._

_. . . that’s just seven years younger than me._

A wash of incompatible truths collided inside her, like matter and antimatter: Daddy, who demands and enforces my absolute slut submission with shattering orgasms and punishing mouthfuls of piss, is to this kid merely Dad, Maker of Macaroni and Cheese, Homework Monitor, Permission Slip Signer, Goodnight Kisser. _Well, he’s Goodnight Kisser to me, too._ That uncomfortable sliver of the Venn diagram where their realities crossed filled her with unease.

 _But it’s never been like that,_ she argued to herself. She might call him Daddy, but that didn’t reduce her to some perverse sibling. Daddy was other, separate things to her. Grown-up things. Professor. Benefactor. Cinematic Comrade. Seducer. _And even more,_ she realized. The _more-than-that_ had no name and no form but its dense want cast a shadow inside her. Even if she couldn’t define it precisely, the tingling spark of its potential sang a future to her. 

Daddy made a beeline for her across the corridor. As if the _more-than-that_ had called his name. 

Joy percolated up inside her. 

“It’s my first day,” she burbled when he got close, answering the question she knew he was about to ask. She pointed to her nametag. _Rey._ The silver badge that named her, that said she belonged here.

“Looks good on you,” A real, full smile expanded across his face, a smile she never imagined he had tucked away inside it. Its crooked incandescence delighted her, made her bat her eyes and twist at the hips in unconscious girlish glee. She’d tamped down her eagerness to see him every moment after he’d left her pounded and trembling in the projection booth. And now here he was, as if she’d wished him here, back in the theater where it all began.

His son shuffled up shyly beside him, his unspoken question clear. _Who is this girl, Dad? Why are you talking to her?_ Rey noticed with tremendous relief that she was, in fact, still taller than him. Such a silly and arbitrary thing to be relieved about. But she clutched at the straws of its normality.

Daddy read his son’s behavior correctly. “Miles, this is one of my students. This is Rey.”

“Hullo,” Miles mumbled. 

“Hi,” said Rey. Her new role as ambassador of this movie palace emboldened her. “What did you think of _Ratatouille_?”

“I liked it.” He wasn’t a bad kid. Just shy. The question opened him up, made his eyes gleam a little. “But I’d seen it before.”

“But not on the big screen,” Daddy corrected him.

“Yes I did, Dad. In Columbus, at Gran-gran’s house.”

“That was _Hugo_. You’re remembering that because a rat ran down the aisle and all the kids screamed.”

“Oh yeah!” A smile dawned over the kid’s face. “With a Rasinets box on its head. I remember.”

Rey read the ease in their father-son relationship. This wasn’t performative banter, done for her benefit. She could tell because she’d been on the other end of the fake stuff many times. Apathetic caregivers suddenly performing the burlesque in the presence of other adults, ruffling her hair and saying, _Hey kiddo_ , _doing good today?_ It wasn’t like that between Daddy and his son. Rey read the quiet, loving authority with which he’d obviously parented this boy, all the small kindnesses and firm expectations that had shaped him over years into, she had to admit, a very nice kid.

Daddy turned to Rey. “Have you seen it?”

“Yes,” she beamed. “I like Brad Bird’s Pixar movies the best,” she answered eagerly. “And I have extra love for this one because it’s the best movie about being a critic, and the relationship of art to criticism.” She was attacking the question a little too eagerly, like a dog snatching a Frisbee out of the air. _Teacher’s pet._ She couldn’t help it. Talking about movies in public with Daddy felt like secret foreplay. Maybe that was the shape of the _more-than-that_.

_Friend._

The things you know about a friend. The things they like and don’t like. The ways they’ve decided the world works. The things that hurt them when they were small. The hopes that still furnish their future.

She knew a lot about Daddy. She knew the planes of his body and the taste of his semen. But he knew more about her. She’d poured her thoughts and feelings out for him in every assignment. She knew those essays didn’t land in a void. He read them, absorbed them, took them to heart. But in the end they were only monologues. That solipsism never bothered her before. She was just glad to be listened to.

But now she knew about that smile.

Standing in the theater hallway, the crowd still milling around them, she made a voiceless wish: _I want to know everything about you. Even your mistakes are beautiful to me. I want to know the strings that pull that smile and I want to give you reasons to pull them, every day, for the rest of your life._

Something flicked at Daddy’s attention, as if his radar was set off. “Miles,” he turned, impatiently. The kid was fiddling with a phone. “Put it away. We _just_ got out of a movie.”

The kid flipped the phone around. “It’s Mom calling.”

A photo filled the phone’s screen, a photo the boy had undoubtedly chosen to match the entry in his contacts. Rey’s gut dropped. “Strawberry blonde” would have been charitable. The woman in the photo was the kind of redhead who looked scalded white, with ghostly eyelashes and sharp, swooping eyebrows that loomed over eyes the color of a picnic-threatening sky. That was the face that went with that puncturing dart ofa voice Rey remembered. 

That was the woman Daddy married,  
had a baby with,  
once upon a time.

Daddy took a breath, held it, said nothing. “Fine,” he finally blurted. The kid turned and took the call.

Daddy turned back to her. “Can I tell you something?” he said. And then, as if uttering a blood oath: “I hate those fucking things.”

Rey giggled. “I hate them too.” Poverty had made her yearn for many things, but the symbiotic relationship people her age had with their phones was not one of them. They carried a serendipity-destroying device around with them at all times, an index-card sized intrusion that stole the magic of the world and sold it on the cheap for a delusion of reach and knowledge and power. Moments like this, of seeing Daddy unexpectedly, couldn’t be engineered in an app. Thinking about him on a par with her beloved typewriter and vintage clothes connected the dots into a venerance for the elegant things of a lost, older world, in a way she’d never thought about before.

“His mother got him that,” he explained about the phone. “So they could keep in touch.” Rey read the expression on his face perfectly. He wouldn’t deny his son being able to contact his mom, but he knew and resented the reach it gave his ex into his life.

He cleared his throat and continued. “So what do they have you doing here?”

“Usher,” she answered. “Which eventually means I’ll do concessions and box office. But just sweeping up for now.” 

He looked back at the untidy theater, now empty. “I’m keeping you.” She knew he meant from doing her job, but the double meaning still made her swoon.

“It’ll only take a minute.” Then, on sudden impulse: “Do you and Miles want to see the projection booth?”

She’d said it rashly, but luckily Mark the manager was accomodating. Daddy and Miles loitered in the lobby for a few minutes while Rey scrambled through the theater on the quickest thorough clean-up she’d ever done. Even if Daddy was waiting, she couldn’t do a half-assed job. This was a _theater_. So she scuffed popcorn into dustpans double-time and snatched up discarded candy wrappers and coffee cups with the plucking avidity ofa magpie. Something glittered on the floor.

“Hey, Galaxie,” Rey said as she walked back into the lobby, the prize in her hand. “I think someone lost an earring.” She unfolded her hand to reveal the singleton diamond. “Do we have a lost and found?”

Galaxie peered over the concession counter. “We do. If they don’t claim it in a month, you can keep it. Want me to put your name on the list?”

“I don’t really like colorless stones.” Another aesthetic truth she’d grown brave enough to admit. “Besides, my ears aren’t pierced.” She dropped the earring into Galaxie’s palm moments before she felt the wall of heat behind her that could only mean one person’s presence.

She eagerly turned to face Daddy. “Ready?”

The three of them climbed the narrow stairway to the booth together, Rey leading single file. The theater had been built in an era when people were smaller and less spoiled for comfort. Rey didn’t mind being crammed in the rat corridor. It made her feel like the theater was hugging her. She noticed with some small delight that Daddy’s shoulders just brushed the cinderblock walls. They were close enough now to hear the hum of a projector going at full purr behind the landing door.

“This is it,” Rey said with hushed pleasure, and opened the door.

The cocoon of the room’s warmth hit them first. The glow of the projector bulbs toasted the air to a cozy hug and the soft thrum of the motors made a purr that gently shuddered Rey’s body, like holding a purring cat in your arms. 

There were three projectors in place, two of them currently running. They were behemoths compared to the spindly 16mm projectors Rey had known from grade school, the ones with the Mickey Mouse ears of film reels spinning vertically above them. These 35mm projectors housed the film horizontally, on huge, slowly spinning silver platters big enough to bake a giant’s pizza. They unreeled langurously, their lenses spitting one frame at a time through the glassed portholes cut in the cinder block walls, onto the screens below.

Rey turned to look at Daddy. She knew the look of wonder on his face wouldn’t just be because of the machinery. A theater’s projection booth is its heart. If it’s an old theater, it’s been occupied by generations of film lovers. This nest was feathered with the affectionate detritus of hundreds of employees who’d passed through its door and added some small token – film posters, obsolete fliers, cut out newspaper articles, stacks of water-stained _Video Watchdog_ magazines, tchotchkes, in-jokes, photos of past good times at the theater. A patina of anarchic goodwil bearing the fingerprints of hundreds of movie lovers, only for the eyes of one of their kin.

“You can take a look,” she said to Miles. 

She pointed him over to the projector still running _Eat Drink Man Woman_ in theater three. Miles wriggled past the film platters and sidled up to the glass porthole, crouching down slightly to peer through it. “Oh, wow,” he said. “You can see the movie. Dad, look.”

Daddy came over to take his place. Rey crept into the space behind him. He had to crane his head down even further to peer through the porthole. Rey swapped spots with him and took her own peek. On the screen in the dark theater an elderly Chinese man was gutting a fish. The filets slapped tenderly against a cutting board as he scored them, floured them, ladled hot oil over them with the care of bathing something beloved.The reflected moonlight of the screen washed against every seated viewer, outlined their head and shoulders in a fingernail of silver. 

Rey realized that this theater she now looked down into was where she and Daddy had their first assignation. She looked down on that moment now from the angel vantage of a week into the future. A warm shiver of contentment wriggled over her. It was lovely to be here. She turned to Daddy, eyes shining. The same mix of homecoming satisfaction and awe in his eyes reflected back to her. In one weightless moment she felt the boundary of who she was soften and melt into him.

“Have you been up here before?” he said softly to her.

Rey shook her head. “Just once today, a few hours ago.”

“When I was little my grandmother always told me you can make a wish the first time you go to a new church.” He smiled that same extraordinary smile again. “So make a wish.”

Rey’s heart soared. She locked eyes with him and poured everything about that wordless wish right into him . . . 

. . . and felt it come back to her triplefold, reflected in the theater of those dark eyes.

Something above Rey’s head caught Daddy’s attention. “Wow,” he mouthed silently. He turned. “Hey, Miles,” he said, pointing to a heavy sheet of metal hovering just above the porthole like a blunt guillotine blade. “This is how old the theater is. They still have all the safety features from when nitrate films could catch fire and burn the whole theater down.”

“Neat,” Miles said politely, although Rey could tell he didn’t share his dad’s enthusiasm.

“That’s why projection booths exist,” he said to Rey. She could hear the excitement rising in his voice. “Pre-1951, film was printed on nitrate stock. Nitrate is beautiful – the blacks are so dense and the details are so crisp – but it’s extremely combustible. So they built the projection booth like a bunker, out of concrete –“ he knocked his knuckles on the cinderblock wall “-- and with safety shields like this one.” He pointed to the sheet of metal. “That’s held in place by wax. When it melts, the shield snaps down over the porthole and protects the people in the theater. But not us, in the booth.” He spoke only to her now. “In the 1930s a projectionist died on average every 18 days. Either burning up in a projection booth fire, or being poisoned by the nitrate fume smoke.” He looked at her. “You used to have to love the movies enough to be willing to die for them.” His words consecrated the already consecrated space. Rey felt the pluck of the the thread between the syllables _sacred_ and _sacrifice_.

Miles wandered off, distracted by the phone in his hand. He loitered in the booth’s lit vestibule while Daddy pointed to some stray strips of black and white film thumbtacked to a corkboard. “Have you seen film before?” Rey shook her head. He carefully unpinned the long wafting strip. “The stuff on the platters is 35mm. This is 16mm. It’s smaller across. But the amount of film coiled on a reel is measured in feet. Film is the only substance that’s measured in width by the metric system and in length by the English system.” 

He pinched it gently by the inches and held a span of it up to the light. Now they saw why the projectionist had saved it. A topless woman in burlesque costume gyrated one increment at a time, her blonde meringue hairdo marking her provenance from the 1950s. Daddy had no eyes for the way the woman’s tongue licked at her eyeteeth and her breasts spilled up and down in chiaroscuro stop motion. “See that long silhouette?” he said, pointing to the jagged symmetrical shape printed up the edge, like an endless mountain range reflected in a lake. “That’s the audio track. This one’s in mono. A second light in the projector shines through it and turns the shapes into an electrical impulse that goes through a speaker, so we can hear the sound. That second light is below the lens, so it doesn’t interfere with the picture. But that also means the sound is a few frames off from the picture it matches to. So if you’re watching an old film and it’s been repaired, with the damaged frames spliced out and the ends re-taped together, you hear the hiccup in the soundtrack before you see the change in the picture –“

“—like how you see the lightning before the thunder,” Rey finished the thought.

He lowered the film and looked at her.

“I’ve been too hard on you,” he whispered.

His eyes flicked down to her collarbone. She could see the glitter of her necklace reflected in his dark eyes, framed against the black of her collar. 

He spun his finger in the dime-sized smallest of circles. _Undress._

She reached up in that familiar tingling trance and slid the nub of her first shirt button out of its slit. He gave the signal to _stop_ almost immediately, a swipe of the hand small enough to just seem like he'd brushed dust off his collar. He just wanted to see the treat she’d bought for herself.

“It’s pretty,” he whispered.

“Thank you.”

“Come with us for a milkshake,” he said. “I’m taking Miles to the Starlight after this.” The Starlight was Finnsville’s 24 hour diner. Rey had walked past its wide windows, envied the comfort of the diners inside tucking into succulent cheeseburgers and glossy wedges of cherry pie. He’d never invited her anywhere in public before. Finnsville must be far enough away from school to assume no one would recognize them together. 

“I can’t,” said Rey with a pang of lost chances. “I’m here until closing.”

“I don’t want you walking home alone. I’ll get you a taxi.”

“Okay,” she said. Her cheeks flushed with pleasure. “Thank you.” 

She swallowed hard. 

“Friday,” she whispered to him.

“Friday,” he murmured back. Rey felt the expanse of twenty-four hungry and burning hours stretch out intolerably in front of her. The ache of her abused patience had gone dormant, but now, seeing him here . . .

and the memory of that smile . . .

 _I’m not going to let you leave,_ she thought, _without seeing it again._

“What’s the first movie you saw in a theater?” she asked impulsively.

“ _Pete’s Dragon_ , my mother says. But I don’t remember it. The one I remember is _The Empire Strikes Back_.” His eyes lit up. “I had a glow-in-the-dark Han Solo charm I got out of a cereal box. I brought it with me to the theater to see if it really glowed and I forgot all about it as soon as I saw Darth Vader.” He grinned deliciously.

She couldn't resist.

"What temperature is a Tauntaun?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Lukewarm."

He snorted. " _I'm_ supposed to tell the dad jokes," he chided, but his fangy, gorgeous grin betrayed him.

 _There it is._ Satisfaction bloomed inside her. It was a fragile blossom, a night blooming cereus that withered in the cold realization that twenty-four hours would plod by in their same non-negotiable lockstep no matter what.

 _But I made you smile_ , she thought, and hoped that bittersweet warmth would linger.

“Dad,” said Miles. 

Rey blinked, surfacing from the spell.

Miles had the phone to his ear. “Mom wants to know if she can pick me up early tonight. Rick got the new Fortnite chapter and I want to play it.”

Daddy’s mouth opened and closed a few times but he said nothing. Rey held her breath. The opportunity splaying itself open like a night blooming cereus defying all biology, changing its vegetable mind to taste one more exquisite night awash in its own perfume.

No taxi home tonight, she knew.

_**To be continued . . .** _


End file.
